After the Deadline review: Every writer needs an editor, and this one works for free

Writing can be hard enough, and editing's no cakewalk, but editing your own writing...whew. After the Deadline helps you get the job done, bringing the full complement of editing tools found in office suites to browser-based applications and blogging software.

After the Deadline integrates neatly into other programs (Chrome pictured here) to help you check for style problems.

Available as an add-on for Chrome, Firefox, OpenOffice, and Wordpress (as well as some lesser-known programs), After the Deadline goes well beyond the basics of spelling and grammar checks. It conducts stylistic analysis, outlining passive voice usage and other pitfalls common to fiction writing. Its implementation is very unobtrusive, with suspect words or phrases underlined in red for spelling errors, green for grammar suggestions and blue for style issues.

After the Deadline is free for personal use and requires an Internet connection.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the desired add-on.

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Review: Sublime Text 2 is a refined text editor that's a pleasure to use

For a coder, using a text editor or an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is almost a political statement. Even choosing between a text editor and a complete environment (debugger, code hints, and all) is a big choice, and may have a major impact on your coding style, productivity, and comfort. If you're an IDE kind of guy, JetBrains is famous for its highly evolved environment. But if you prefer the simplicity of text editors, Sublime Text is way up there with the very best. At $70, it is also incredibly expensive for a text editor–in fact, it's $21 more than JetBrains' excellent WebStorm JavaScript IDE. But for those who prize a simple approach with plenty of power under the hood, it might be worth it.

Part of the appeal of a text editor is its leanness and simplicity. Sublime Text certainly feels lean on the surface, with no toolbars or configuration dialogs. It's also very, very fast. But that simplicity is only skin-deep: dig in just a bit, and you'll find yourself immersed in plug-ins, clever auto-completion tricks, and more. What's so nice about Sublime Text is that it lets you slowly grow into using its power. Unlike Vim, for example, it doesn't feel inscrutable to the uninitiated. You can run it and just start typing, Notepad-style. But ask for more, and Sublime Text shall deliver.

Sublime Text's sophisticated fuzzy text matching lets you quickly get to the files you need.

Another benefit of using Sublime Text is that it looks the same across Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. This is because it uses its own custom cross-platform UI framework, which also lends it some unique controls you won't find in other editors. The most noticeable one, and the only one you'll see at first glance, is the minimap - a miniaturized bird's eye view of your code, which runs along the right-side gutter of the editing pane. When working on long files, you can use the minimap as a visual scrollbar and instantly scrub around the file for points of interest.

Sublime Text uses a text file for configuration, which is an acquired taste..

The minimap is unique for another reason: Its use of the mouse. The rest of Sublime Text is keyboard-centric, and much of its appeal lies in a real-time search algorithm that's remarkably clever. You can use it to quickly open any file in your project: type "idsp", and the list of possible files narrows down to include selections such as "ideas_spec" and "server.pid," with the relevant letters shown in bold type. Using a loose mix of initials and prefixes, you learn to land on almost anything in your code as soon as it comes to mind. If you want to go to a specific line number, you can follow your string with a colon and the number – so, "idsp:100" will take you to line 100 of the relevant file.

Sublime Text's minimap stretches along the right gutter of the document, letting you quickly scrub over long files.

Another useful feature is effortless column selection: If you want to add the same bit of text along multiple lines (for example, several closing parentheses marks in following lines), you can simply select a column of text and type your text. Multiple insertions points will appear, and you will see your text entered into several spots all at once.

Sublime Text 2 also has a system of plugins, the most important of which is called Package Control. This plugin lets you easily search for other plugins from within Sublime Text, and download and install them right from the editor. When I needed to add a word count to the status bar, it took me less than a minute to use Package Control and find a plugin that did exactly what I needed. Its search interface uses the same fuzzy string matching common throughout Sublime Text, and is just as quick to use.

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.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Review: Customize and alter your photos with PC Image Editor

It’s a common misconception that you need Photoshop to get really good looking photos. The truth is that there are many excellent image editors out there on the Internet that allow you to make changes to your photos which are as good as anything Photoshop could do. PC Image Editor is one such app, free for personal use ($24 for business use), which allows you to make changes to your images.

Installation is extremely easy and extremely fast, with no hidden spyware surprises trying to sneak in, such as toolbars. When starting it up for the first time, you will be told that the software is free for personal use, while commercial users need to purchase a license. This becomes one of the main irritants of the entire software app – every time you open up the app to use it for free, that same nag screen is going to keep coming up because you haven’t entered a license code yet. I really hope the developer provides some way in a future release for free users to disable that screen as it gets really annoying after a while.

PC Image Editor provides you with lots of options to customize your images. The photo updates in real time as you tweak each option.

Once you’ve zapped the nag screen, click “open” and navigate to the image you want to make adjustments to. Then on the right hand side, you will see all of the tools  open to you. For example, you can resize the photo to either a size that you specify or one of the predefined sizes that the app offers. You can also rotate to various angles, zoom, sharpen, as well as change the color and contrast .
There are also numerous effects on offer which takes a page out of Photoshop's book. PC Image Editor offers a wide range of filters and effects such as blurring, twirling (turning the picture into a round shape) and changing the angle of the picture. If you would like to achieve a unique effect to the picture, then the filters include embossing, halftone (which pretty much turns the color picture black and white), and changing the RGB values of the colors.

Each adjustment can easily be made by moving the slider back and forth.

Every change is made in real time so you can see how each step of the affects the image. If you realize you’re making a right dog’s dinner of the image, you can click the “undo” button to roll back the last change you made. Once everything is to your satisfaction, you can save or print the new image . Formats which you can save in include all the usual suspects such as JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP and TIFF.

There is also the option to scan an image directly into PC Image Editor using a scanner, but every time I clicked on the “scan” button, PC Image Editor crashed and closed. I don’t know if this is a Windows 8 issue or an issue with PC Image Editor. So it may work for you. Let us know in the comments below if this is a problem you encounter.

These days, with ready access to image editors, there is no excuse for bad photos. If you find that your images need a bit of jazzing up,PC Image Editor offers a basic selection of  editing tools that provide the most-used features of more expensive applications. Although it’s not the best image editing program ever, it’s worth a try if you need a few basic tweaks.

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

Expatriate Scotsman now living in Wurzburg, Germany, freelance writer, frustrated future bestselling author, obsessed bibliophile. Other interests include trying to understand The Architect in the Matrix movies, decrypting codes and ciphers, and trying to persuade my landlord and my wife to let me have a Highland Cow for a pet.
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Review: WeVideo is a cloud-based video editor that makes editing in your browser fun and simple

The cloud is all the rage these days. We've got email in the cloud, backup in the cloud, not to mention project management, image editing, and pretty much everything else that you use your PC for in the cloud. WeVideo wants to add one more type to the mix: A cloud-based video editor.

What makes it potentially hard to get off the ground with a cloud-based video editor is that all of your raw footage must find its way into the editor. A decent five-minute video could require hours of raw footage to create. Since most users have connections with slower upload than download speeds, you could be uploading footage for hours on end before you can even begin editing. Fortunately, WeVideo's seamless connection with Dropbox and others cloud-based file storage services makes this less of an issue.

Erez ZukermanWeVideo makes it easy to export to connected cloud services, but its free option is watermarked.

When I use my Galaxy S III to shoot footage, it is automatically uploaded to Dropbox. The upload takes time, but I don't need to think about it or do anything to make it happen. Once the files are in Dropbox, I only need to point WeVideo at them, and it pulls them into the editor very quickly. Feeding WeVideo with a gigabyte of footage took less than ten minutes, once it was all on Dropbox.

Once your footage is in the editor, the editing experience is simple and pleasant. WeVideo offers a timeline you can drag clips onto. It is easy to trim clips as needed and add transitions, and there's a rich library of soundtracks you can use. Fading audio in and out takes just a couple of clicks, and the whole system felt responsive and would be familiar to anyone with experience with desktop video applications.

One advantage of WeVideo's cloud-based nature is collaboration: You can invite friends to upload footage to your project, and even create different edits based on the same footage. This collaborative workflow is one of the service's main selling points.

Once you're done editing, it's time to export your work. Free accounts can only export very low resolution (480p) watermarked video. I understand the limitation, but I wish WeVideo was more upfront about it and made it clear as part of the registration process, rather than reveal it at the last possible moment when the editing work has been done. It is easy to connect WeVideo to YouTube and other Web video services, so you don't have to download a file and upload it to YouTube yourself–WeVideo does the whole thing on its own.
If you need to collaborate on a video project with a distributed team, WeVideo offers important benefits and can let you share footage and edits in ways that aren't possible otherwise. It can also come in handy for the occasional solo project, as long as you don't mind uploading your footage to the cloud prior to editing.

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

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Review: Free Editor lets you open and edit over 70 different file types for free

In our everyday lives, we use a number of different programs to edit the various file types we work with. There's Word for DOC files, Excel for XLS files, PowerPoint for presentations, image editors, video and music players, PDF viewers, Hex editors, ZIP expanders, and the list goes on. Most of us use a separate program for each one of these purposes and never stop to think about it. Free Editor claims to open for viewing and editing all the aforementioned file types, and more, all by itself.

For DOC files, Free Editor includes all the basic formatting options, including tables, links, highlighting, etc.

Free Editor, as you can gather from the name, is completely free to use, and according to its support pages, can open and edit 75 different file types, including Microsoft Office files, other document files, image files, Windows files and coding files. I chose to start my tests with simple DOCX and XLSX files, and took Free Editor through its paces. I was immediately impressed by how lightweight and responsive it felt; there was no hanging and no waiting, and aside from a weird but harmless error message which appeared every time I opened a Word 2007 file, I could edit any file I chose to.

For Word documents, Free Editor supports all the basic editing functions such as formatting, images, links, tables, numbered or bullet lists, find and replace, and more. The table toolbar is especially easy to use, and surpasses even Word's native table tools. The editor also includes a spellchecker, which is a nice touch. While Free Editor managed to show any DOC and DOCX file I fed to it, it failed to show figures and images that were already in the document.

With Excel files, things get a bit trickier, as Free Editor does not include Excel's formula bar, which makes it next to impossible to use formulas. While you can insert any formula you wish, there are no helpful suggestions to help you along, and after entering a formula and getting a result, there's no easy way to know which formula is written in the cell. Surprisingly, Free Editor does include more advanced editing options, such as conditional formatting—but with an oversight as big as the missing formula bar, it's just not enough.

Spreadsheet editing in Free Editor is not very intuitive, but includes advanced features such as conditional formatting and other cell customizations.

This is not the only major oversight, however. When it comes to editing documents, most people tend to use basic keyboard shortcuts; and what's more basic than Ctrl+C for copy and Ctrl+V for paste? Both these shortcuts are notsupported in Free Editor, forcing you to either use the context menu or the provided toolbar buttons to copy and paste. Another sorely missing shortcut is Ctrl+I for italics, which was reassigned to show the document's info. Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+U for underline work, which makes it even stranger. Other shortcuts such as Ctrl+F for find, Ctrl+H for find and replace, Ctrl+P for print, and Ctrl+S for save work like charm.

There are still over 70 formats Free Editor can open, though. Free Editor has very basic image editing capabilities, with rotate, resize and crop functionalities, brightness and contrast controls, and three basic filters. It also managed to open and edit ePub files, EXE files, TXT files, DLL files, BAT files, coding files such as CSS and JS (although some were missing syntax highlighting), and was even able to open and extract ZIP and RAR files. It completely failed, however, to open either PDF or PowerPoint files, despite its claim to support them, yet managed to open and play multiple music and video formats that get no mention in the supported formats list.

Remember how Free Editor felt so responsive and lightweight? It sure did, so imagine my surprise when I checked its RAM usage, and discovered it to be 10 times higher than Microsoft Word, and 5 times higher than Microsoft Excel, when editing the exact same documents. In addition, the program does not prompt you to save changes when you close it, so it's very easy to lose all your work if you forget to save. You also lose your changes if you switch to the built-in Hex editor without saving—no prompt here either.

As an image editor, Free Editor is very basic, but can handle almost any file format.

Free Editor's strength is in its ability to edit many file formats, and on that it delivers almost perfectly. While the editing capabilities are sometimes rather basic, it can be extremely useful if you're looking for a free way to edit documents, spreadsheets, code, etc. Its built-in Hex editor and resource editor are also helpful if you want and know how to bore into EXE and other system files.

When compared with paid options such as Quick View Plus, Free Editor gives a fair fight, especially due to its ability to open media files and its attractive price tag, but will not be as useful for businesses that need to frequently open PDFs, presentations, etc. For the average user, Free Editor doesn't offer any real perks aside from being free, and in the end, you're better off using a more specialized, less finicky program with better capabilities.

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

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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Free Image Editor MAGIX Photo Designer 7 Gives You Pixel-by-Pixel Control

It's hard to know what to expect from a free image editor. After all, if all was fair, we'd be getting Photoshop minus about $700 worth of features. But many free editors, MAGIX Photo Designer included, have great strengths that serve a niche, and make them invaluable: If they do what you need them to.

Although Photo Designer's selection of preset art filters is very complete, they all seem to result in an uncannily similar effect.As a lover of Xara products, I was really excited to try out Magix Photo Designer 7, billed as the free version of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer ($89). But the products are so different they are barely recognizable as even half-sisters, and few of the features I love about Xara are in Photo Designer's gene pool.

Photo Designer's red-eye reduction tool worked very well on the image I tested. Unlike the step-up versions, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7 or Xara Designer Pro ($299), Photo Designer creates an iris-sized stamp that you use with one or two clicks to gray over the red-eye parts of your images. I found it to be just as effective as the gray dot you need to somewhat accurately draw using the more expensive versions--and it's certainly easier to get the hang of.

I also preferred Photo Designer's Clone Tool over the Xara software. Photo Designer's version works more like Photoshop in that you chose the clone and then paint over the area you want to replace. It's simple and a lot more effective than the new Xara method.

These were the only features of Photo Designer that really impressed me, however. Like other Xara photo editors (and high-end products like $700 Adobe Photoshop), Photo Designer has the tools to select groups of pixels and make changes specifically to the selection. The tool is an exciting addition, but its effectiveness depends greatly on the Photo Designer brush you have selected, and there's not much in the way of help: Rather, you're left to experiment. If your experimentation goes well, however, expect to be able to apply blur, fill, brightness, and color adjustments to selected pixels within your image.

Photo Designer includes fewer features than GIMP (a free, open source image editor), which makes it less intimidating. And much like Serif's PhotoPlus X5 ($89), Photo Designer includes a Task Assistant, which takes you step-by-step through common tasks like creating panoramic images, isolating parts of your image, and optimizing colors. PhotoPlus X5's version is much more detailed, however, and although it's a nice feature in Photo Designer, it oftentimes left me wanting help with the next step.

Photo Designer includes a number of interesting presets to turn your image into a painting, drawing, or other style of artwork. These filters worked relatively quickly, but not very well, and certainly nowhere near with the same finesse as FotoSketcher, a free tool that excels at turning images into fine art. I found myself adjusting the settings manually to differentiate Photo Designer's preset effects from one another.

If you're looking for a free image editor to manipulate specific parts of your images---down to a pixel by pixel level of detail---or make quick changes, Photo Designer 7 may be a good fit for you. It's a little clunky and unpredictable, especially compared to sister product Xara Photo & Graphic Designer, but the ability to 'Shop images for free is worth the tradeoff.

--Clare Brandt

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Geek Alert: Text Editor EmEditor Professional Worth a Look

EmEditor Professional ($40, 30-day free trial) is a powerful text editing program with many features that can make it useful to programmers, Web designers, system administrators, and anyone else who regularly works with unformatted text.

EmEditor Professional handles large files, and delimited files, with ease.The interface for EmEditor is very standard--a variety of panels which can be shown or hidden, with a central tabbed editing area. Slightly confusingly, some of the side panels are controlled by 'View' and others by 'Plug-Ins'. While this makes development sense, it's not instantly intuitive where to look to turn on or off a feature. This is a common thread throughout EmEditor: It's often a bit more of a task than it should be to figure out how to use a particular aspect of the program, but there are enough cool bits in the program that it can be worth it, especially if you're not already committed to another text editor and thoroughly indoctrinated in its quirks.

EmEditor documentation isn't the best it could be, being both sparse and peppered with questionable English, but it does get the job done. Simply put, while there were things I felt I should be able to figure out just from looking at menus, that I instead needed to go to the documentation for, said documentation did answer my questions with minimal searching. It also responded to the most obvious and intuitive keywords.

Some of the things I like a lot about EmEditor Professional include: parsing of delimited files, which includes the ability to specify delimiters; support for reading large files without overflowing memory; a lot of ability to customize the options for various file types; and powerful outlining, both in-document and in a side panel. Other useful features include a macro record feature, along with the ability to write complex macros using either VBScript or JavaScript.

Beyond that, EmEditor has many of the features expected of a professional text editor: multiple copy/paste, vertical or "block" selection, file comparisons (diff), and so on. It does not, however, have a very sophisticated hook into common development tools like Visual Studio; you can set it up as an "external tool", and samples are given to help with this, but there is no automated integration.

Speed-wise, I found EmEditor quite responsive and easy to use. The wealth of configuration options and the ability to quickly change them on a file-by-file basis makes it very useful if you regularly edit a lot of different file types, which I do, jumping from Java to PERL to HTML to CSV regularly in the course of a working day.

EmEditor is under constant development; a look at the change log shows that EmuraSoft is quick to fix bugs and add features.

EmEditor is inexpensive, powerful, and has many useful features, but it's hard to say it dramatically raises the bar over similar tools, such as UltraEdit, especially if a user is already committed to such a tool and has configured it to their personal tastes. Freeware programs such as NotePad++ also offer a lot of functionality for no price, though EmEdit has code navigation features NotePad++ lacks.

This is a problem in general with programs in mature categories; so much of the core functionality is standard that it's hard to justify changing for a small number of improvements or new features. However, if you're in the market for a text editor and not closely tied to a particular one, EmEditor Professional is very much worth looking at, as it offers an exceptional mix of features and tools at a low price.

--Ian Harac

With EmEditor Professional, a text editor for Windows, you can create functionally-rich macros using JavaScript or VBScript, allowing you to define most operations. Not only can you define a macro which records keystrokes that you use and reference repeatedly, but you can also write your own macros which can manipulate other applications, Windows files, or network functionalities. The macros are based on the Windows Scripting Host (WSH) engine, so you can use all of the powerful, robust objects available under the WSH. Other EmEditor Professional features include Unicode, Plug-ins, Find in Files, Replace in Files, Combine Windows (ability to toggle between tabbed-interface and single document interface), Keyword Highlighting (including embedded scripts in HTML, ASP and PHP files), OLE Drag and Drop, and Menu/Keyboard Customizations. The Windows 98/Me version is also availeble from EmEditor Home Page.

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Komodo Edit: Feature-Packed Free Programmers' Editor

A programmer's editor has to strike a fine balance between being powerful enough for daily use and staying out of the way so you can just look at your code and think. The search for the perfect editor can take years. If you're not perfectly content with the editor you're currently using, you might want to consider Komodo Edit (free). Komodo offers some compelling features at a price that can't be beat.

Komodo Edit features syntax highlighting for many Web-related scripting and markup languages, but installing new color schemes isn't as easy as it could be.Komodo Edit is a free, cut-down version of Komodo IDE, a complete development environment for Web and cloud-based projects, comparable to JetBrain PhpStorm. This is one thing that makes it different from other free code editors such as jEdit and Notepad++: Komodo offers a subset of what can be done with Komodo IDE.

Another important difference between Komodo Edit and other editors is that Komodo 7 is built on the same code base as Firefox 4 (Mozilla-2.0). This means it is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, without being Java-based. It also has a "Firefox-style" extension system for finding and installing add-ons.

Like most other modern code editors, Komodo supports customizable color schemes. There is even a website dedicated to Komodo color schemes called Kolormodo. It didn't have my favorite scheme, scientifically proven Solarized, but I was able to track it down with a quick Google search.

Once I had the scheme file on disk, installing it proved trickier. The scheme selection dialog didn't provide any hints, nor did the online help system. I ended up locating an obscure folder containing all other schemes and putting the file there to make Komodo Edit recognize it. I later discovered I could have simply dragged the file and dropped it over the Komodo icon. Too bad this wasn't mentioned in the application or documentation, though it is in the marketing materials.

On a day-to-day basis, working with Komodo Edit is a pleasant experience. Its built-in FTP client lets you access remotely hosted files without having to create a project or download an entire directory tree. If Firefox is your browser of choice, you would feel right at home with Komodo. For example, the Find feature works just like the one found in recent Firefox versions, with live search and a bar along the bottom of the window.

Komodo's auto-completion feature is excellent, similar to the one found in Microsoft Visual Studio: You get a scrollable menu with completion options, rather than having to blindly tab between options. I compared it with jEdit, editing a simple snippet of CSS, and it fared significantly better; jEdit's auto-completion stopped working after a few attempts. Komodo Edit also features other amenities, such as code folding and simple text zooming using the mouse wheel.

If you already know you need a full-fledged IDE, choosing between Komodo IDE and competitor JetBrains PhpStorm is a tough call. But if you're not sure whether you need an IDE or just a powerful editor, you can start out with free Komodo Edit and maybe graduate up to IDE if you find you need advanced features such as debugging or source code control integration.

--Erez Zukerman

Komodo Edit 4.2 is a free, multi-platform, multi-language editor for dynamic languages and Ajax technology, including Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl; plus support for browser-side code including JavaScript, CSS, HTML and XML. Background syntax checking and syntax coloring catch errors immediately, while autocomplete and calltips guide you as you write. Available on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. XPI extensions allow you to create your own plug-ins. XPI extension support provides the same capability as Firefox, with all standard Mozilla APIs based on XUL, XBL, and XPCOM, plus our own for Python and JavaScript. Other features include Vi emulation, Emacs keybindings, code folding and code snippets.

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