Articles by Michael Muchmore
Google Play Music
With its All Access subcription service, the updated Google Play Music has come of age. The inclusion of this subscription service trumps Apple’s iTunes, and Google delivers an excellent, well-designed system, with a large catalog of any music most people are likely to crave, and a beautiful, full-function interface similar to Rdio’s. Equalling iTunes Match…
Snapseed (for iPhone)
Instagram is far from the only app in the iOS photo-fun game. Nik Software is a more venerable maker of photo enhancement software, having developed pro-level effects for Photoshop for years. The company’s Snapseed can not only add zest or interest to images shot with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch camera, but also share…
Pincam (for iPhone)
When Twitter’s video sharing app Vine launched last month to great fanfare, what you often heard was that it was “like Instagram for video.” (Around the same time, Twitter actually stopped allowing Instagram photos to show up on users’ streams.) But the comparison doesn’t flesh out very well, since a big part of Instagram is…
Repix (for iPhone)
People will never seem to tire of ways to create, enhance, and share photos. Instagram was far from the first to give people this kind of outlet on their smartphones, but it’s been the most successful. A seemingly endless succession of one-uppers is following, one of the latest hits in this parade of photo apps…
Carbonite Currents (beta)
Everyone and his brother seems to be getting into the folder and file syncing business of late. Dropbox, SugarSync, and Microsoft have been in the game for nearly a decade. The recent trend started with Microsoft’s folding its Mesh syncing product into SkyDrive, followed by Google Drive, both arriving last April. More recently, we’ve seen…
Adobe Premiere Elements 11
The biggest change in the latest version of Adobe’s consumer video editing software, Premiere Elements 11 ($99.99), is the same as in its companion photo editor, Photoshop Elements 11—a redesigned, simpler interface for both the complementary Organizer app and the editing program itself. Premiere Elements 11 also adds some new effects, including cinematic FilmLooks, slow…
FileLocker
The trend towards moving all your digital content to the cloud has gotten the most exposure wth consumer services like Apple iCloud, Google Drive, and Microsoft SkyDrive. These services can store things like photos and documents, automatically syncing them among all your devices and computers. But cloud syncing really becomes powerful when used in a…
SlickPic
In 2010, the nascent SlickPic service took as its mission to improve on what was available in the Web photo sharing space. With Facebook and Instagram’s domination of casual photo-sharing and Flickr’s deep tools for image organizing and broad photography community, that’s a tall order. SlickPic does offer more for your photos than you get…
Flickr (for iPhone)
Flickr is the most popular photo-specific web service around (with over 26 million unique visitors per month, according to recent comScore numbers) and it earned our Editors’ Choice as the best. But its mobile app has long been held up as a missed opportunity because of the many features of the main service it lacked….
Cubby (beta)
Folder-syncing services such as Dropbox, Box, SugarSync, and SkyDrive keep all your files accessible at all times, using cloud storage. Cubby, a new entry in this genre from respected remote-access software maker LogMeIn, adds a twist that makes storage limits a moot point: Its DirectSync feature lets you sync between your own separate computers without…