Share, snapshot, and stream your games with these 7 tools

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AppId is over the quota

You’ve honed your gaming skills to razor sharpness. You’ve used the six utilities that make a monster out of a milquetoast. Now it’s time to let the world see just how awesome you and your gaming rig have become. The following utilities let you record, play, and broadcast gameplay moments, and allow you to immortalize your triumphs on your favorite online gaming communities.

Ever have a moment in a game that you wished everyone could see? Maybe it was the time the dragons in Skyrim started to fly backward. Or the afternoon you cleared out the airfield in DayZ without a suffering a single bite or bandit’s bullet. Windows itself handles static screenshots well, but if you’re looking to record footage, you have to crack open the toolbox.

Fraps doesn’t offer much in the way of gameplay recording.

Virtually every serious gamer is familiar with the venerable frames-per-second reporting tool Fraps. This handy utility also records gameplay footage in real time, even in its free incarnation (although it limits you to 30-second clips until you fork over $37 for the upgrade). However, the CPU usage is a bit on the high side, and features are limited. Other contenders offer distinct advantages.

Action’s slick interface puts the others to shame, stylewise.

Action by Mirillis is screen-capture software on overdrive, sporting many options that Fraps lacks, such as audio-only and partial-screen recording as well as desktop capture (although you’ll need Aero enabled for that). Tests with Dishonored, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, and The Witcher 2 produced smooth recording of both audio and video at full 1080p resolution on a modest quad-core AMD Phenom II test system with Nvidia’s GTX 560 GPU (Action takes advantage of CUDA to speed up encoding operations).

Action also includes a handy built-in thumbnail catalog and an AVI viewer, which employs Mirillis’s Splash media-player software technology. It even offers simple, no-frills streaming to some services such as Twitch.tv (see the discussion below).

Its frames-per-second reporting features are less robust, but it includes an on-screen counter and recordable benchmark routines, which should satisfy most users. The slick, black-and-gray interface is a pleasure to use, as well. Action will set you back $30 for a home license, but you can download it and use it for free for 30 days before you buy. It has also passed Steam’s Greenlight approval process, and there you can find popular forums offering tips on performance and troubleshooting if something isn’t working right with your setup.

Bandicam may not be easy on the eyes, but it is easy to use.

My tool of choice, however, is Bandicam. It lacks the slick interface of Action, but it has all the features that count plus a few extra, including the option to select alternative codecs for video recording to keep file sizes from ballooning into multigigabyte disk gobblers. The Fraps test file I produced for this article came out at just under 2GB for 30 seconds of video. The Bandicam file, created at the same length and resolution, weighed in at 180MB. Impressive. Desktop capture doesn’t require Aero, either.

Bandicam is cleaner and more straightforward than Action, making it quicker to pick up and faster to use. Moreover, the shareware license allows you a full 10 minutes of recording per session. Other than a watermark, the free version imposes no restrictions, which compares well to the 30 seconds of recording on Fraps and the 30-day trial with Action. Its main shortcoming is benchmarking: It supports only a simple frames-per-second overlay.

Keeping a library of pwnage on your hard drive or on your YouTube channel is cool, but you can find more appreciative audiences out there just waiting to celebrate your victories and make memes of your defeats. Twitch.tv, the gaming-centered offshoot of Justin.tv, remains the go-to source.

Newbies, beware: The setup process is laborious, and you must install, register, configure, and coordinate several external tools to make everything work. Twitch.tv and its ilk act as portals to live content, but don’t do the actual job of capturing the gameplay video or uploading it to hosting servers. That’s the domain of specialized broadcasting software running on the local gaming rig.

As with all professional tools, you have to pay to play with XSplit.

The pros broadcast with XSplit, which has a monthly payment plan and boasts wide support among gaming-friendly streaming services. Unfortunately it has also garnered a reputation for its resource-hungry ways and finicky operation. XSplit relies on slick touches such as live camera overlays, multiple input feeds, and other video-mixing features to stand apart from more hobbyist-oriented packages. As you might expect, the system requirements are pretty high for these tricks, although if you’re looking to turn your streams into revenue sources via eyeballs and ads, XSplit and Twitch.tv are the places to start.

OBS makes popular broadcast-destination presets available via a drop-down menu in the settings.

Open Broadcaster Software is the open-source answer to the needs of streaming gamers. Despite undergoing some growing pains, it remains an excellent alternative to the more commercially oriented packages mentioned here. Sitting at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from rental-software models such as that of XSplit, OBS bares its source code for all to see and costs nothing to download or use. The fruit of this approach is a rapid evolution in stability and features since the program’s initial release less than a year ago (although some issues remain, so a visit to the active user forums seems a wise precaution).

OBS supports RTMP streaming and includes presets for popular gaming destinations such as Twitch.tv, so setup is relatively painless. The drawbacks of its rapid open-development cycle are also apparent, manifesting in uneven but acceptable frame rates and occasionally glitchy operation. Most users get along with OBS just fine, though, so it’s worth a look. Keep in mind that it is beta software, so you shouldn’t expect much hand-holding.

Game streaming settings in Xfire allow you to link to your Twitch account.

Xfire made its debut in 2002 as a combined IM and chat client paired with a multiplayer game server browser. Eleven years later, it remains a good destination for your on-screen antics. Over the years, Xfire the company has added various services to the core multiprotocol chat system, and Xfire the program now supports gameplay streaming, group voice chat, in-game Web browsing, and Xfire-hosted clans and guilds complete with ranks, play statistics, and gaming library listings.

You can upload videos to your profile to share with friends and the wider gaming community, as well as broadcast live. Xfire also allows connections to streaming sites outside its own, including Justin.tv and Livestream. The Xfire client’s growing pains as a streaming tool are behind it, and although its performance isn’t on a par with that of the other utilities here, its frame rates are ultimately acceptable on midrange systems. The price remains right (it’s free), and Xfire does so much it shouldn’t be neglected, especially now that the revamped software is coming of age.

Cropped screen recording lets you share selected portions of your desktop on Livestream.

Livestream may not be the most focused streaming community for gamers, but plenty of us wind up there, and it’s not hard to figure out why. Livestream’s free Procaster software is remarkably efficient and versatile, imposing minuscule overhead on the host system, so you don’t see the slowdown issues associated with other products. What’s more, the streaming framerate is superb, rarely dropping below 30 frames per second. Visual quality is also impressive (if a touch soft) at all reasonable bandwidth levels.

Although Livestream offers fewer community features compared to Twitch.tv or Xfire, Procaster does provide dedicated gaming modes. A free, verified account is the way to go, as it provides a 500-kbps streaming channel, 10GB of Web-hosting space for your recorded broadcasts, and unlimited viewers. The only problem with Livestream appears to be the direction of the company itself, as it split its service into “New” and “Original” flavors, predictably focusing on the former and having about as much success as Coke had back in the 1980s. As long as the Procaster software sticks around, however, Livestream will remain a contender.

It has never been easier to get out there and share your virtual exploits with friends and interested gamers across the globe. No matter what your focus, technical level, or budget, there’s a service or software package waiting to turn you into the next gaming superstar. See you on the leaderboards—and remember, if you can see the red dot, it’s already too late.

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Six alternative tools for small business collaboration

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AppId is over the quota

For small businesses today, there’s nothing that can’t be done in the cloud. You could plunk down your cash for Basecamp, Yammer, and Google Docs like everyone else, but alternatives to these stalwarts abound. For something that does more, costs less—or both—check out these six Web-based tools, categorized based on their primary functionality.

Podio may still fly under the radar of such behemoths as Basecamp, but it’s rapidly emerging as the go-to collaboration tool for a new generation of knowledge workers. Originally a Danish startup, Citrix acquired it last year, and the new features keep on coming.

Podio’s marketplace of specialized apps lets you customize workspaces to your business’s needs.

Designed (like most collaboration systems) to eliminate excessive emailing, the structure is relatively simple: You invite employees into Podio’s internal communication network, then create any number of “workspaces” in which they can collaborate. You can admit outsiders on a workspace-by-workspace basis, keeping them out of the broader employee network.

The centerpiece of Podio actually isn’t its basic collaboration and project management system, but rather its innovative use of apps. Podio’s built-in marketplace includes thousands of highly specialized apps for just about every type of management need: property management, managing an art studio, even structuring the due diligence process when acquiring a company. A couple of clicks, and you can transform Podio from a general project-management tool into a highly focused one.

Mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Pricing: Free for up to 5 users, then $9 per user per month.

For those of us in the service or consulting industry, simply managing active projects is only part of the puzzle. Keeping track of various clients, tracking your hours, collecting subcontractor timesheets, and managing retainers and invoicing all take up loads of time probably better spent doing other things.

AffinityLive builds a central database from which you can easily track your client activity. 

To get you started, AffinityLive gathers your email, address books, and calendar (from Google, Office 365, or Exchange) and builds a central database of all your clients. From here you can manage the way you interact with them. Each client gets its own activity stream, and incoming messages are automatically imported into the tool. As contacts progress from prospects to active clients, they’re updated and tracked in the system.

The free version doesn’t do much. It’s basically just a glorified contact database system. You’ll need to pony up $29 per user, per month to incorporate your calendar, do workflow management (including timesheet reports), and access CRM activities like preparing and sending quotes. Higher-end features like managing service contracts, tracking retainer usage, and dealing with recurring or auto-renewing invoices are available in a version costing $59 per user, per month.

No mobile apps (but site is mobile-friendly).

Pricing: Free to $59 per user per month, depending on features desired.

Wiki-building services have a reputation for being complex, messy, and driven more by code jockeys than end users. With many services, initial configuration can be tedious to the point where the idea of starting a wiki is abandoned altogether, let alone creating and managing the database itself.

HackPad’s clean, intuitive interface streamlines the process of creating wikis.

None of that is true with Hackpad. This dead-simple wiki manager can be mastered in a matter of minutes. Creating your wiki takes just a few steps (you get your own keyword.hackpad.com domain name). You can invite collaborators or leave it open to the public to edit. Click the (+) button to create a new document. Multiple users can edit in real time, and a sidebar on the left indicates who wrote what. It’s all very intuitive, simple, and well organized. If you want to get fancy, you can use it to create checklists, drop in videos or pictures, or write code in a communal development environment.

Public sites created with Hackpad are free. Private wikis are free for 30 days or up to five users (whichever happens last). After that you pay a measly $2 per user per month—which also gets you access to premium support. If wikis are in your wheelhouse, it’s an amazing value.

No mobile apps.

Pricing: Free for up to five users, then $2 per user per month.

For talking to your mom, Skype is fine, as is the occasional overseas call on your laptop or mobile device. But serious videoconferencing or telepresence is another thing altogether. If you have two offices on opposite sides of the country—or the globe—keeping the team working together can be a big challenge. This impacts many more small businesses than you’d think: Companies that rely on pockets of operating groups located all over the place are becoming increasingly common.

Mezzanine lets videoconferencing participants use their own devices to share content, apps, and ideas across multiple screens.

Oblong is the company that’s bringing videoconferencing into the ’10s. Imagine a bank of large-screen monitors in your conference room connected via the Internet to a similar bank at your satellite office. Full-screen video is beamed in both directions, and both sides can work on a shared whiteboard, present their own content, or share apps. All of this is controlled via the participants’s mobile devices, a Web browser, or a spatially-aware “magic” wand that’s a bit like a Nintendo Wii controller. Oblong is now working on a version of its system that works with nothing but hand gestures, but that still seems to be a few years off.

It’s pretty cool stuff, and that’s not surprising: The developer consulted on the seminal film Minority Report. To be sure, this kind of technology doesn’t come cheap (pricing isn’t disclosed, but it’ll definitely cost more than a webcam). Still, while Mezzanine may not be in reach of every small business, those with serious distances to cross might find it worth at least getting a demo. For the rest of us, it’s a tantalizing glimpse into what the future of collaboration is probably going to look like.

Mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Pricing: Not disclosed.

Social networking is popular enough that savvy businesses are considering a Facebook-like system for their employees. But it needs to be private. After all, you can’t have them updating their resumes on LinkedIn all day when they should be doing their jobs.

Bitrix24 should feel natural for users of popular social media platforms.

Yammer has long been the standard for private social networks, but Bitrix24 is also worth a spin. It’s got some extra features and may be less expensive, depending on how large your company is.

For starters, Bitrix24.looks a lot like your standard social network, offering each user a news feed/activity stream, private conversations (you’re supposed to talk about work), messaging, and photo galleries. There’s even a “like” button, which Bitrix24 uses to influence the way search results are organized. As a lighthearted motivation tool, you can set up badges that managers can hand out to workers in exchange for a job well done.

PacBitrix24, based in Eastern Europe, also has integrated project management features, so you can forgo a separate tool if you use it for workflow and to-do lists. All of this is included in the system for a flat monthly fee. Unlike most cloud-based services, Bitrix24 is all-you-can-eat for most installations: $99 per month for the Standard plan, or $199 for the Professional plan, which adds a records management and a scheduling system, among other tools.

Mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Pricing: Free up to 12 users/5GB, then $99 to $199 a month.

There’s no shortage of cloud-based productivity apps, from the venerable Google Docs to HyperOffice to Zoho. Surprisingly, the most capable of the bunch might now be Microsoft Office 365, the Web-based version of the industry-standard Office software.

Office 365 brings all the functionality of Microsoft Office to the cloud, making it a more business-ready alternative to Google Docs.

Office 365 works in tandem with the offline version of its software, but it’s also fully capable in its browser-only incarnation. If you know how to use Office, you know how to use Office 365. As with buying Office for offline use, how much you pay is determined by how sophisticated your business needs are. The bare minimum, at $5 per month per user, gets you Web-only access to the system. Bumping up to $12.50 per month per user gets you desktop versions of most apps, plus Office Mobile for your smartphones, for a maximum of 25 users. At $15 per month you get Microsoft InfoPath added to the mix, plus support for businesses up to 300 employees in size.

Designed with multiple users in mind, users can work on a document simultaneously, and the included email handling tools bring Exchange-class administration to small businesses that wouldn’t normally be able to afford a mail server. Sure, it’s hard to describe anything from Microsoft as “alternative,” but it’s easily worth a look in an increasingly Google-run world.

Mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Pricing: $5 to $15 per user per month.

HackPad Simple-to-use real-time wiki Hackpad has innovative features and a free plan.

Download Now

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Five tools to bring the Start menu back to Windows 8.1

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AppId is over the quota

When Windows 8.1 ships tomorrow, the Start button returns with it—but if it’s the Start menu you miss, you’ll still need one of these utilities. They bring back the classic pop-up menu that Windows 8 summarily removed, and they add extra features and customization that Microsoft never thought of. Most are free, and the only one that costs anything is well worth its extremely low price. Whether you make the jump to Windows 8.1 immediately or wait a bit, there’s really no point in waiting to enjoy these enhancements to your Windows experience.

Clicking the Start button just puts you into the Windows 8.1 Start page—but fortunately, programs that bring back the classic Start menu still work. The simplest of the programs I tested are Stardock’s $5 Start8, IOBit’s free Start Menu 8, and ReviverSoft’s free Start Menu Reviver.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this is Windows 7, but it’s actually Windows 8.1 with Start8.

All three produce decent facsimiles of the Start menu, but Stardock’s Start8 does the most accurate job of reproducing it. Start8 is still very useful under 8.1, offering a choice of the Windows 7 look-alike Start menu or the new Windows 8 Start page.

It’s easy to switch between the two approaches. You don’t get the same amount of control that you get with other menu programs, though. You can’t configure the look and feel of the menu very much, and you can’t create custom shortcuts.

You can customize the Start-menu button in Start Menu 8’s clean interface.

Start Menu 8 performs similarly to Start8, producing a decent reproduction of the Windows 7 Start menu. It lacks some of the design polish of Start8, but its nice extra touches include the ‘Switch to Metro’ button that takes you to the Microsoft Start page, and the MetroApps option, which provides direct access to apps that use only the Windows 8 Metro interface. These make it a little more useful for those who want to bridge the gap between the two versions.

Start Menu Reviver’s unique Start menu owes more to Windows 8 than Windows 7.

Start Menu Reviver, as the name suggests, also brings back the Start menu, but it dispenses with the past and instead adopts a look that’s in line with the Modern design style of Windows 8 itself. It doesn’t take over the desktop—the Microsoft Start page is still accessible as one of the tiles.

The most interesting feature in Start Menu Reviver is the ability to create and tweak tiles. You can create a tile for any installed program by dragging and dropping its icon onto the menu itself. You can also easily move, resize, or delete existing tiles, making this new style menu very easy to customize.

For anyone looking simply to replicate the Windows 7 Start menu, Start Menu 8 is the simplest and most flexible option. But Start Menu Reviver impressed me: It feels more like a Windows 8 program, and it provides a lot of flexibility. And it’s fair to say that all of these programs do a better job than Microsoft itself of making Windows 8.1 easier to use.

The free Classic Shell and Pokki go beyond adding a Start menu, offering extra features that actually improve the Windows experience. In fact, both of them predate Windows 8, making them the only programs here that you can test-drive on an earlier operating system.

Classic Shell offers three styles of Start menu, plus options to customize its look and feel.

Classic Shell 4.0 adds a number of new features to Windows 8.1, including a customizable Start menu, enhancements to Windows Explorer, and tweaks for Internet Explorer.

Classic Shell’s Start menu offers three designs: a classic, Windows-XP-type design; a two-column, Vista-like design; and a Windows-7-style Start menu. The Start Screen of Windows 8.1 isn’t completely replaced, though: Instead, Classic Shell pins the Start Screen at the top of the Start menu and lists all of the programs from that screen as menu items under All Programs > Apps.

If you would prefer to add to rather than replace the new Start button, Pokki creates an alternative way to start programs. In Windows 8.1, Pokki works alongside the returning Microsoft Start button, adding a button called Home. This brings up the Pokki menu, which offers a customizable list of program shortcuts, as well as a few familiar options from the pre-Windows 8 Start menu.

If you have a long list of programs, you can search by typing a letter in Pokki’s search box. This kind of search also turns up control panels and files.

Pokki also offers a range of free programs (such as Angry Birds and Instagram client Instagrille) that you can install with a single click. You can pin any installed program to a spot on the home menu, which can hold up to 25 program shortcuts per page (there are four additional pages available, for a total of 125 shortcuts). If you don’t want to scroll between pages, a text window at the top of the menu allows you to search by name: Just type the first letter, and the list of shortcuts that begin with that letter show up.

Overall, Pokki still provides an excellent accompaniment to the Microsoft Start menu and Start page, allowing you to start programs faster and more efficiently, and install new ones quicker and easier than you could via Microsoft’s own App Store.

When Windows 8.1 was first announced, we thought these apps might be finished. But that’s not happening: Microsoft’s poor compromise of linking the Start button and the Start page still leaves a features gap that these utilities address.

These five apps offer a solution that Microsoft itself seems to not understand: Give the users what they want, and the power to tweak it to their requirements.

Richard Baguley has been writing about, testing and breaking technology for the past 20 years. He has written for Wired, Macworld, USA Today, Amiga Format and many others
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Skitch brings markup tools to Evernote PDFs

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AppId is over the quota

Many business users rely heavily on Evernote for managing documents and other information, but the service's Achilles' heel has long been its lack of markup capabilities.

That's where Skitch comes in. Now owned by Evernote, this desktop/mobile app provides a simple but effective set of tools for annotating documents, the idea being to get your point across visually when communicating remotely.

And it just got a much-needed feature boost: Skitch for iOS (and Mac) now supports PDF annotation.

That may not sound like a big deal, but for anyone who uses Evernote to store and especially share PDFs, it's welcome news indeed. Now you can mark up PDFs with text, arrows, shapes and highlighter tools, then sync them back to your account and/or share them with co-workers.

The new Skitch 2.5 also adds something called Summary, which assembles all added mark-ups into a single view. Evernote describes it thusly:

When you share an annotated multi-page PDF, Skitch lets you add a new first page to that document. This page is made up of previews of each piece of feedback contained in the PDF. Click on one and you’re taken to the annotation. This summary makes it a snap for your recipient to scan over all of your feedback, understand it, and take action without needing to go beyond the first page.

Other additions to Skitch 2.5 include a stamps tool used to add color-coded, at-a-glance feedback (approve, disapprove, question, etc.) to specific areas, and tool tips to help you learn the new features.

Although Stamps is available to all Skitch users, the PDF and Summary functions require an Evernote Premium account (though you can try them free for 30 days even if you're not a paying Evernote customer).

There are, of course, lots of PDF apps that offer markup tools, and a few that can even sync with Evernote. But if you're looking to keep everything in the Evernote ecosystem, as it were, now you can.

For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow.
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Review: Magix Page & Layout Designer includes advanced tools for beginner users

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AppId is over the quota

Printed media may seem to be heading the way of the dinosaur, but until the proverbial meteor hits a stack of business cards, box of letterhead, or freshly-printed brochures on their way to a conference, we'll continue adding paper and ink (and the odd PDF) to our marketing cache.

MAGIX Page & Layout Designer ($150)  anticipates the needs of a growing business by providing a single source for designing anything from a single logo to business cards to a multi-page brochure. However, if you are a Xara Photo & Graphic Designer ($89) fan, you will recognize the UI instantly, and may be left feeling ripped off. It's so hard to find a difference between the two apps, it seems that MAGIX has repackaged Xara with added templates and an inflated pricetag (although Page & Layout Designer is currently on sale for $90).

About a dozen template themes are included in the MAGIX Page & Layout Designer download (you can't access or view them all in the trial). Choose a theme that suits your business, then open business card, brochure, and letterhead templates that all match the theme and are fully customizable with your own logo, text, images, etc. There are about 100 templates in total. All are royalty-free, and many verge on stylish, but organization isn't great. It can be hard to find the matching brochure to your business card design.

MAGIX Page & Layout Designer's slide-out bitmap gallery could mean you never need to hunt and gather on the server for your company's logo again.

Customizing the templates is pretty easy with MAGIX Page & Layout Designer, even if you don't have any design training or experience. For example, a snap function helps you align objects, text is set to automatically flow around your images, and you can chose to work without or without layers.

If you do have prior experience, setting up a page from scratch also is simple and intuitive. Plus, you can easily use MAGIX Page & Layout Designer to create logos and other vector drawings without too much difficulty; and use the photo tools to adjust and manipulate your images. Refer to the Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 2013 review for more detail on how drawing and image editing tools work, since these are identical.

Currently, Magix Photo Manager MX Deluxe ($59) is included in the Page & Layout Designer download for free, and also includes some additional basic photo manipulation tools as well as the ability to organize your images. On the surface, this looks like a great deal. However, you may not need Photo Manager at all, as MAGIX Page & Layout Designer includes a slide-out bitmap gallery. With it, you can save and access all of your logos, logotypes, images etc. for any of your projects. However, I wish it were easier to organize things, and would love to be able to add text boxes (so you never again have to cut and paste your mission statement and other often-used blocks of text).

It seems like MAGIX is trying to reach a new audience with Page & Layout Designer, with no mention of its powerful vector drawing tools and super-easy photo editing in their marketing of the product. But the non-sale pricetag is steep unless you were actually considering also purchasing the bundled Photo Manager MX Deluxe. If you already own Xara Photo & Graphic Designer (or Xara Designer Pro, the $299 heavy-lifter in the family) you are going to be an unhappy T-Rex who'll want to eat MAGIX for lunch.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

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If you get in trouble with your photography, new Picture Tools will help you crop your way out

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Guest blogger Cynthia Hartwig, co-owner of Two Pens (@twopens2), teaches business people how to write social media content from both sides of the brain.

I'm going to make a leap of faith here and assume that you're not a photo professional. That's good, because I'm not a photo professional either. I'm just a photography nut who is smitten with one of the simplest and most powerful tools in Word and Publisher.

People with kids end up shooting endless pictures of everything from first steps to the graduation march. And if you're childless, pets are just as photogenic. The problem is that kids and kittens--as well as dogs, hamsters, ferrets, and pet corn snakes--are moving targets.

Last fall, I spotted a cute cat sporting in the leaves in a planter box in downtown Seattle. The owner was dangling some leaves tied together with string in front of the kitty and it was batting at the toy with both paws. Enter the amateur photographer: I banged off 10-12 shots with my little point-and-shoot and missed almost every one. I got kitty crouched under the leaves; I snapped kitty switching her tail, ready to pounce; I shot kitty launching like a space rocket, no leaves in sight. But did I capture kitty batting the leaves? Nope.

The shot below is the best of the worst. Unfortunately, it has the owner's shoulder intruding on the action. Kitty's lower body is out of focus.  And the leaf litter in the sand is distracting.

BEFORE: This shot is marred by extraneous information that takes away from the fun the kitty is having.

By reframing the shot, the most in-focus part of the photo becomes the jagged maple leaf shapes and the thread-like veins. This gives the viewer an instantaneous read on the situation: "Oh, I see, a kitten playing with some leaves." More important, though, is the peek-a-book effect that reframing has on the kitten's eye. Animals carry their life in their eyes, so by helping direct the viewer to the kitten's eye, the drama goes up, while sidestepping the fact that the amateur shooter (moi) missed the shot. 

AFTER: Getting rid of the arm and shoulder of the person sitting next to the cat focuses on the action. The peek-a-book effect on the cat's eye and ear tells your eye where to go.

In the old days, art directors cropped with two pieces of cardboard laid on a transparency to find a photo's sweet spot. In my past life as a creative director, I remember a lot of moving of the cropping ells around the image, the humming under the art director's breath, and sometimes a swear word or two if the photographer bumbled the shot. Magically, the best part of the image would emerge under the cropping ells.

Maybe that's why I love the fact that Microsoft has included your own powerful crop tool in Word and Publisher.  Just drag the sliders set to the width and height you want to fill and move the crop box all over your image. What you're trying to do is find the most alive part of the photo that still tells a story.

Now you try it.  To crop one of your pictures:

In your file, select the picture that you want to crop.Click Picture Tools > Format > Size and click the arrow under Crop.

After you click Crop, your mouse cursor becomes a cropping tool. In your picture, you'll notice the sliders at the four corners and on each side. Click your cursor on one and crop it any size or way that you want.  Here's what my picture of the cat looked when I was in the middle of cropping it.

This summer I snapped photos at the regional bike polo competition at Seattle's Magnuson Park. A man with the organization asked me if I'd mind sending him some photos because this new group didn't have money for a professional photographer.

"Sure," I said, but to tell the truth, when I looked at my photos of this fast-paced and often brutal sport, I was bummed. What I hoped to show was the heat and the athleticism and the blood and scabs. What I got was a lot of static shots and lame compositions. Good thing I wasn't charging any money for my work!

In this shot, I managed to get three bike wheels and the polo-type mallet all one frame. But frankly, the effect is pretty busy with a lot of details competing for your attention. The shadows on that hot August day added to the confusion.

 BEFORE: The repetition of the wheel shapes is nice but there's too much going on in this shot and the shadows need to go.

In the crop below, I edited out the shadows entirely. This allowed the leaning biker in cut-offs  to become the focal point. It also put the emphasis on the three off-center bike wheels. I edited all the extraneous elbows, hands, and torsos, reasoning that viewers intuit  that a hand or a foot would logically be attached to the bodies, so no need to show what the viewer already knows. . (You can use this tip in almost any shot: Just ask yourself how much of the body part or horizon or sky one needs before the viewer will fill in the blanks.)

AFTER: A tighter crop cuts down on the messy, irrelevant details and focuses on the action of three bikers scrapping for the bike polo puck.

In the shot below at a family get-together at Twin Lakes, Oregon, I caught my six-year-old niece, Kasey, and her nine-year-old friend, Althea log rolling on the edge of the lake. It's not a bad shot--the colors are vivid though the girls are relatively small in the photo.

BEFORE: The colors of Twin Lakes, Oregon, are vivid and there's good action with two girls playing on a log. But, the eye has to take in a lot of information and there's not much focus.

AFTER: By cropping out a lot of the sand and the big stump on the shore, the emphasis shifted to the two girls. The action is focused in the lower right third of the shot, a better compositional choice.

I opted to crop into the large brown sand at the bottom of the photo, and I also eliminated the big stump on the right. I figured that the girls were the highlight of the image, so my crop choice told the viewer where to look. The cropped shot is both cleaner and simpler.

My nieces had a lot of fun rolling on that log throughout the weekend so I made a point of following their activities with my camera.  If you're learning, like I am, keep shooting in order to challenge yourself to get something better.

In the shot above, you get the drama of two little girls balancing on the log and you get the reward of Kasey's facial expression that tells you she's trying hard to balance.  This version is one I had no problem showing their parents. But look what happened when I changed the crop from a horizontal including the shore to a vertical crop which removes it!

AFTER: By cropping the shot of two log-rolling girls from a horizontal to a vertical, I eliminated the shore and told a more dramatic story.

By cropping out the shore, my shot tells a different story. For all I know, one of the nieces took this home and showed her mom what a lame babysitter I am. 

For more of my photographer adventures with Office 2013 templates and new Picture Effects tools in Word and Publisher, be sure to check out these posts:.

Five easy ways to use Picture Effects to rescue ho-hum photos

'Tis the Season for Making 2013 Photo Calendars

--Cynthia Hartwig

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Review: Manga Studio 5 levels up with new tools and a fresh UI

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Manga Studio 5 has a bit of everything for digital artists who create illustration and comics. Featuring an overhauled user interface, including new brushes and tools, it's a good time to start with Manga Studio ($80, buy-only). Current Manga Studio 4 may want to wait for file compatibility fixes before purchasing a $50 upgrade from Manga Studio 4 Debut or EX.

Desktop view of the new Manga Studio 5 user interface and panels with artwork by Karen Luk.

Manga Studio 5 showcases new coloring tools. Similar to Photoshop, the layers panel comes with new options such as Clip Layer, Multiply, Quick Mask, and more. New brushes for watercolor, oil and pastel are familiar to Painter users. Artists can create custom brushes and share them. The airbrush tool creates multiple effects for painting. Ink and pencil drawing tools have improved control options. For example, artists can vary anti-aliasing with the ink tool. For creating comics, vector snapping of panels, type and speech balloons helps to layout a comic page. Type and panels are editable on the fly. Manga Studio 5 comes loaded with zip tones and effects for comics which artists now can color for effect.

The 3D human models are a new and welcome reference. Artists can alter female and male models and then pose them using the built-in character rigging. Guidelines on these models assist in designing outfits. 3D models of manga girl and boy teens are clothed with swappable outfits, expressions, and head details. A variety of common poses and 3D hand gestures are included. Under the File menu, you'll see a new item: Qumarion. Quma is a real-life model that's plugged in via USB. It's fully articulated, and the selected 3D model mimics movement in real time. Smith Micro has not yet decided whether it will distribute Quma to the US or European market.

In Manga Studio 5, most standard features from Manga Studio EX 4 are included. Others, like the multiple comic page layout and perspective rulers, are not present. Smith Micro provides a full comparison of the Manga Studio family of products. The company is dropping the "Debut" naming convention for  this new version. Manga Studio 5 is "Manga Studio 5 Debut" with the upcoming Manga Studio 5 Ex maintaining the use of “Ex” to distinguish it. Expanded 3D options and more features will arrive in Manga Studio 5 Ex, which is slated for a Summer 2013 release.

Artists can pose 3D models like this manga teen girl and select different expressions, hairstyles and clothes.

Currently, files created in Manga Studio 4 or earlier are not compatible with Manga Studio 5. The publisher is working on fixing this by the second quarter of this year, but if you're planning to work with your Manga Studio 4 files, it would be smart to wait until the functionality is solid.

With a price point of $80, Manga Studio 5 is great catch-all art program. New coloring tools with customization, layers, panel creation, responsive drawing tools and 3D models makes it ideal for creating illustrations and comics. Newcomers will discover that Manga Studio 5 is a versatile art program without breaking the wallet.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Karen Luk is a freelance illustrator and art instructor who creates comics. Her work has been featured at the Cartoon Art Museum and Google. Recently, she successfully funded her upcoming Steampunk ABC children's book on Kickstarter.
More by Karen Luk

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Review: Daemon Tools USB lets you access and share your remote USB devices

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Daemon Tools made a name for themselves with simple, no-nonsense optical drive emulation software that allows your disk libraries to go from cake boxes filled with silver platters to immediately accessible disk images stored on your hard drive. While commercial upgrades have appeared over the years, the free version retained most of the handy features and became a staple power user's tool. The company's focus has barely shifted over the years, with variations on platform support and paid features as the only real changes since the first version of Daemon Tools rolled out. Their latest product, Daemon Tools USB ($7, 20-day free trial), is a modest attempt to move away from the emulation business with a utility that allows remote access to USB-connected devices as if they were plugged in locally.

Shareable USB devices appear in the Local tab.

The ambitions here are modest and comfortably met. By running a copy of the software on a host system, you gain access to USB-connected devices such as thumb drives, printers and hard disks on other systems also running Daemon Tools USB. You can specify passwords and configure custom port numbers and proxy servers, so security (if not particularly robust security) is provided.

The interface is a model of simplicity, but this is less of a compliment than a consequence of its singular purpose. Access speed is swift and reliable under most circumstances, although this is largely dictated by network bandwidth. Despite its simplicity, I still had trouble accessing a few devices, such as a SanDisk portable USB drive that refused to allow remote access, while others worked perfectly.

Preferences are sparse, but Daemon Tools USB does support proxies and custom port numbers.

The interface is a tabbed window that allows you to specify and configure local USB devices for sharing and to access remote devices you've added to your server list. Under most circumstances, simply sharing the same device over a network via the normal OS route would duplicate this functionality.

There are a few scenarios that Daemon Tools USB simplifies, however. Printers and webcams often require a direct USB connection for access to management software, for example. Daemons Tools USB is a good fit for these situations. Not too many people need to share devices under those circumstances, however.

Server lists provide access to your remotely connected devices.

This brings up the next problem: price. While $7 doesn't seem a lot of money, Daemon Tools USB doesn't do much. Sure, it's just the price of two cups of coffee at Starbucks, but I like coffee and enjoy it every day. I doubt I could say the same about a $7 investment in Daemon Tool USB. I'm sure there are people out there looking for the solution this software provides; I just haven't met them yet. That makes the price a bit of stretch, especially since no free modes of use exist beyond the 20-day initial trial.

If this software appeals to you, you likely already know about it, although that doesn't make the cost any less irksome. Workarounds exist for almost every usage scenario this utility covers. For the rest of us, it's the answer to a question no one asked.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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New PowerPoint tools allow new forms of (better) presentations (video)

With the photo and video tools in PowerPoint 2010 and Office for Mac 2011, you can tell better stories in your presentations. For example, you can now create video wallpapers and video is a no-brainer - no longer to start and stop your PowerPoint must show a video.

Do give it a try? Download a free trial version of Office 2010 or Office for Mac 2011 now. Switch to the Office.com to read more about video in PowerPoint, see an index of articles about the photo tools on the Office 2010 including remove background and art effects.

Our see the Roundup MOM 2.0 coverage here.

--Doug Thomas

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