Reviews

As the name suggests, GroupShot is all about creating photos of groups of people. In my experience, any time you're trying to take a photo of two or more people, someone is either looking in the wrong direction, smiling with a smile that implies there's something odd happening in their bowels, or their eyes are closed.

gThumb is one of the best image viewer and browser applications available for the GNOME Desktop. I particularly like its adeptness in handling both still photography and videos. That is an unusual pairing for an image viewer on any platform. You are not likely to find this combination, or at least one that works so seamlessly, in other image viewers.

gThumb is one of the best image viewer and browser applications available for the GNOME Desktop. I particularly like its adeptness in handling both still photography and videos. That is an unusual pairing for an image viewer on any platform. You are not likely to find this combination, or at least one that works so seamlessly, in other image viewers.

Using Filterstorm for iPhone made me wonder what life would have been like if I'd chosen the iPad edition of the app instead. Filterstorm is obviously powerful, it's much more versatile than the generic set of filters you see in a lot of other iPhone photo retouching apps, and near as I can tell, it delivers each and every feature it flaunts in its App Store description.

In my mind, the most important element of any software application is the ability to make users feel empowered, as if they can act on information, make changes, or best yet, create. Apple's new iBooks Author application for Mac OS X lets you create -- so much so that I actually believe that I could write an awesome iBook textbook myself.

Has anyone else noticed that you rarely receive a copy of hotel room-service receipts? Why is that? It hadn't really bothered me that much over the years -- despite a niggling feeling it should -- until an incident recently where the dollar amount I had signed for clearly didn't match the checkout bill. In this case, the hotel had added a service charge after I'd signed -- and after I'd added a tip to the receipt.

Has anyone else noticed that you rarely receive a copy of hotel room-service receipts? Why is that? It hadn't really bothered me that much over the years -- despite a niggling feeling it should -- until an incident recently where the dollar amount I had signed for clearly didn't match the checkout bill. In this case, the hotel had added a service charge after I'd signed -- and after I'd added a tip to the receipt.

If you spend a lot of time at your keyboard, no doubt you dabble a lot in listening to Internet radio. Radio Tray is a relatively new Linux app that can make tuning in to your favorite radio stations a new experience. Radio Tray is a streaming player for online radio that sits on the Linux desktop panel. Think of this app as a shortcut that hides the browser interface.

If you spend a lot of time at your keyboard, no doubt you dabble a lot in listening to Internet radio. Radio Tray is a relatively new Linux app that can make tuning in to your favorite radio stations a new experience. Radio Tray is a streaming player for online radio that sits on the Linux desktop panel. Think of this app as a shortcut that hides the browser interface.

Back when Apple promised editing features built into the iPhone 3GS (the first iPhone to have a video camera), I wondered how a video-editing program could possibly fit into a phone. It wasn't just a question of available processing power, though that was part of it. It was also a question of screen size. Video editing needs a lot of space.