Paragon Software Group has officially launched Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Suite and Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional, the latest versions of its renowned hard drive management tool.
As revealed in our exclusive first look, Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 features a new partitioning engine it claims to the “fastest available” plus introduces a number of new features, including the ability to split a partition in two.
Windows 8 Consumer Preview is a very interesting look at where the operating system is going next, in particular with features like the new Windows app store, but of course it’s also a beta and needs to be treated with caution. Especially as it can’t be uninstalled should things go wrong.
If you only want a quick look round at the Windows 8 highlights, then, the safest approach is to install it on a VirtualBox virtual machine. You won’t have to spend time freeing up a laptop or creating a new partition, and can browse the new Metro interface in a window on your desktop: far more convenient.
CyberLink has released the final version of CyberLink PhotoDirector 3, a brand new version of its high-end photo management and editing tool. The new release boasts a number of powerful new editing tools, including an object removal system, a “People Beautifier” system offering skin smoothing and wrinkle removal among other retouching features, watermark editor and lens correction tools.
The final release comes two-and-a-half months after the public beta was launched, which attracted over 50,000 users and 5,000 comments, which CyberLink says led to several improvements and new features being added to this first stable release.
Microsoft has released betas of its various Visual Studio 11 editions – Ultimate, Premium, Professional, Test Professional and Express – along with Team Foundation Server and the .NET Framework 4.5.
And of course it’s no coincidence that the latest version of the IDE has arrived on the same day as the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Visual Studio is all about developing for Windows 8, and its integrated tools for publishing directly to the new Windows App Store will make it much easier for developers to reach a potentially huge market.
Microsoft has today announced the release of its Windows 8 Consumer Preview, and made it available to download for anyone interested.
While it’s not tagged as a beta, the Consumer Preview is still a prerelease edition, unfinished and incomplete, so you need to be very careful where you install it. It’s also much closer to the finished product than the Developer Preview, though, and includes the Windows Store amongst many other interesting new features, so if you’d like to see where Microsoft are going next then it’s well worth a look.
The Handbrake Project has announced an update to its open-source, cross-platform video transcoding utility. Handbrake 0.9.6 includes new and updated codecs, improved filters and demuxers, a new “Normal” preset promising faster transcoding times and improvements detecting DVD discs.
There are also a number of platform-specific changes, including various user interface tweaks spanning Windows, OS X and Linux. OS X users also lose support for DVD encryption using VLC 2.0 due to a lack of support from the latter.
Multimedia specialist MAGIX has released Photo Manager MX Deluxe, the latest edition of its photo workflow package, extending the program’s already ridiculously lengthy feature list with some worthwhile new additions.
If you’re looking to create a panorama, for instance, the new montage tool will automatically combine, position and crossfade up to eight individual images, variously correcting for lens distortions, perspective and other issues to produce the best possible panorama. That’s the idea, anyway; our initial tests weren’t always successful, but did show the tool is capable of some impressive results.
Screen capture can be as simple as hitting the Print Screen key on your keyboard, but if you’re slightly more demanding you’re going to have to look elsewhere for a more advanced tool than those built into your operating system. Snagit is one such a screen capture tool that has carved out something of a name for itself on both Mac and PC, and can be used to grab entire screens, individual windows, capture on a delay and much more. The release of Snagit 11 and Snagit for Mac 2.0 sees a major new feature – the ability to capture video as well as stills – added to the Mac version, while Windows users have a number of key improvements and new features to enjoy.
ISO disc images are an increasingly popular way of distributing software, but the standard tools for working with them aren’t particularly useful. Windows 7 can burn ISO images to disc, for instance, but that’s about it, and disc burning packages typically don’t do very much more.
Turn to a specialist tool, though, and it’s a very different story. WinISO in particular is one of the most powerful image management packages around, providing everything you need to create, open, edit, extract, convert and otherwise work with a variety of CD, DVD and Blu-ray disc image formats. And while it’s normally priced at $29.95, this Wednesday you can obtain a full copy of your own for no charge at all.
Security vendor Secunia has released the first public beta of its Personal Software Inspector (PSI) 3, an excellent tool which now makes it easier than ever to keep your installed applications up-to-date.
And the key change this time comes in what the company calls the program’s “dramatically simplified user interface”.
System Explorer has for some time been a real contender to Process Explorer when it comes to PC monitoring. The program’s security scan, its ability to permanently set process priority and affinity, its VirusTotal and VirusScan.Jotti.Org integration, easy links to online libraries for quick process information, and a handy History tab logging exactly what’s been happening on your system are all good reasons to give the tool a try.
And the latest release provides yet another, with the introduction of full 64-bit Windows support.
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