SIGNIFICANT BITS SOFTWARE REVIEWS This month’s column is about some software you may have come across. Hallmark Card Studio My wife’s fourtieth was fast approaching. I wanted to send out those great photo greeting cards as invites. Turnaround time and flexibility were important. Office Max had a kit by Hallmark. Hallmark’s kit included 40 long glossy photo cards and two software items. The main app is called “Hallmark Card Studio Photo Card Edition” version 1.0.0.5. A companion calendar app gets installed alongside. There were some bumps setting my Epson RX-700 AIO to print borderless. Otherwise, the software looked polished, the interface items were obvious and properly labeled, and the workflow was easy. One positive feature was how quickly it was to swap images in an existing image box. This software is similar to commonly available presentation software, prefigured for producing long photo cards. The included templates and graphics were usable. I used some of the included background and border graphics. For other graphical items I looked elsewhere. For a short run and quick turnaround, Hallmark’s kit worked out really well. Thunderbird Portable w/Lightning My U3 drive failed and I needed a new one, quickly. My brother gave me a 16GB (!) USB thumb drive (non-U3). I installed the freeware PortableApp.com suite. Moving my work email over from the U3 drive was easy and merely involved copying and transferring a folder. The newer version of Thunderbird/Lightning used by PortableApps defeated some of my Lightning extensions, namely the SQLite Manager and the extensions managing the button that lets me quickly change outgoing email servers. So far, my opinion of Thunderbird is that it is better than MS Outlook for portability, and easier to use than Pegasus mail client. Lightning (Sunbird, et al.) is usable, but the tasks need to be improved greatly. If 50% or more of your reason for adding the Lightning calendar extension to your Thunderbird email client is for managing tasks, then expect to be frustrated, regardless of whether you are using the portable versions or the local version. If needing a non-MAPI POP3 email client, and not needing to view HTML email (but being able to parse the text portions), and needing to download attachments, I would still recommend JBMail3.x. Windows Live Messenger While I’m down on many things Microsoft, Windows Live Messenger (WLM) is a hit in my book. Compared with other IM clients, WLM does not support accounts on other networks. Compared with other MSN-enabled IM clients, it is nicer in “feel” than Pidgin (formerly GAIM?) and Trillian Basic. I have not tried meebo.com (yet) or any other web-based IM client. Since I use IM almost exclusively for work, and my employer uses Microsoft servers, desktops and services, I gave up using a multi-network IM client and just went with WLM, which installed without any problem on my work machine. Installing WLM on my Gateway MX-series laptop proved problematic. Having WLM on my laptop would be handy for when working remotely. I was determined. The laptop was in MSN IM no-mans-land. Could it be possible that my laptop had fallen out of tune? Rather, I think it had to do with many attempts at optimizing the laptop for media production. My current version of Messenger was in flux and not working. To boot, I was not happy with any portable version of any other MSN-enabled IM client. Thanks to Microsoft Live Support for helping me rapidly with this issue by email. It turns out that, sometimes, Windows Messenger 4.7 (WM4) (integrated with XP and not removable) gets in the way of the installation. The web-based installer could not perform the install because of my setup issues with WM4. Email support directed me to the actual WLM download, which installed effortlessly the first time. Despite the similar name, Windows Messenger and Windows Live Messenger are different products based, in part, on different technologies, with somewhat different purposes. For more on Windows Live technologies, see their website. Wikipedia has it explained a little plainer at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live. |
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