Review: Magix Page & Layout Designer includes advanced tools for beginner users

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.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Magix Page & Layout Designer includes advanced tools for beginner users

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.

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Review: Cryptocat chat client includes encryption

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.
More by Erez Zukerman

Chatting online is easier than ever; chatting securely, not so much. The chat clients built into Facebook and Gmail emphasize ubiquity and ease of use over encryption. Cryptocat is one chat client that says you can have both security and convenience, and made quite a splash upon arrival.

CryptoCat's simple aesthetic makes it easy to focus on the conversation.

Cryptocat demonstrates an important lesson about security software: Newer rarely means better. Following a glowing profile piece Wired published on Cryptocat and its developer, 21-year-old Nadim Kobeissi, security guru Bruce Schneier published a cautionary post in his blog letting readers know Cryptocat wasn't as safe as it seemed. At the time, the problem was that Cryptocat handled security host-side, rather than locally. This has since been addressed, and Cryptocat now runs as a browser extension and handles encryption locally. Still, this is an important example to keep in mind: Encryption software, even when it's open-source, can't be considered secure until it's been thoroughly audited and battle-tested (preferably for years).

While I wouldn't use Cryptocat for mission-critical secret communications, it does add a modicum of security and privacy over the features built into Google and Facebook, and is just as easy to use. After installing a Chrome or Firefox extension, all you have to do is pick a nick (a handle) and a title for your chat room, and presto–you can chat with any other Cryptocat user who joins the room. The aesthetic is decidedly old-school 8-bit, but that only adds to Cryptocat's charm. It's a nice way to chat with friends, and can serve as a reminder that it's important to use other forms of security, too.

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.

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Primordial Medusa: Includes the Kitchen Sink

Excess: It's the defining characteristic of the PCs that sit atop our performance desktop chart, vying for supremacy by cramming bleeding-edge components into massive hulls.

Primordial Computers' Medusa ticks all of the requisite boxes: big case, lofty moniker, a dizzying array of tubes, and a monstrous price tag ($6495). But PCs are more than just the sum of their parts--does the Medusa earn a spot amongst PCWorld's Top Performance desktops? In a word, yes.

I'll start with the guts. The Medusa is built around an Intel Core i7-3960X processor. This is the recently released Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition CPU, but Primordial Computers has overclocked it to 4.9GHz. That CPU is backed up by 32GB of RAM (taking up every available DIMM slot on the Asus Rampage IV Extreme motherboard), and a fair bit of storage space: two 120GB Intel 520 solid-state drives in RAID 0, and a 2TB storage drive. A Blu-ray burner provides access to your optical media.

About that liquid-cooling array: It's...thorough. Everything is liquid cooled--the three AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards, the CPU, the RAM, even the motherboard. A bit much? I think so. But you will not want for thermal headroom, if you're one to play with voltages and core clocks.

All of that care pays off--the Medusa earned a score of 207 on our new WorldBench 7 benchmarks suite, a few pegs higher than other machines on the chart. As expected, it's no slouch in the gaming department--91.8 frames per second in Crysis 2, and 187.1 fps in Dirt 3, at a resolution of 2560 by 1600 pixels, on high settings. Anything over 30 fps is considered playable, and 60 fps is the gold standard for a smooth experience. These dramatically higher results are nice, though; you won't need to upgrade this behemoth anytime soon.

The Medusa's innards are housed in a Corsair 800D case. It's a familiar chassis that's spent quite a bit of time on PCWorld's charts, and is one of my favorites. Getting inside is easy, as the case walls pop off at the push of a button. But once you're in, you may not find much to do: The liquid cooling means taking a lot of tubing apart if you actually want to get in there and make some changes.

The four hard-drive bays are held in a separate, fan-cooled bay. They're readily accessible from the front of the case, and drives can easily be swapped in and out--just press a latch, and pull on the tray. Tool-free and accessible--always appreciated.

The trio of graphics cards offer a total of three HDMI ports, six mini-DisplayPort connectors, and 3 DVI ports. On the motherboard, you'll find six USB ports, four USB 3.0 ports, one eSATA port, analog audio output ports, an SPDIF optical output port, a PS/2 serial keyboard and mouse port, and the requisite Gigabit Ethernet port. The motherboard also offers Bluetooth connectivity, and a button that clears the CMOS battery--very handy if something goes wrong while you're tinkering.

So what's missing? Bloatware. The system hosts a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate, and nothing else. There's also no multiformat card reader, and the liquid-cooling reservoir on the face of the unit blocks most of the available 5.25-inch drive bays, but I suppose one can't necessarily have everything.

Is the Medusa nevertheless a good value? Forget the lofty price tag for a moment. Quick and dirty calculations put the parts list at about $4715. Add another $500 or so for the barbs, reservoir, radiators, pump, cooling fluid, and tubing that goes into that liquid-cooling array. And then there's shipping charges and sales tax.

Sure, those numbers are rough--you could probably do better on some parts, and get free shipping from sites like Amazon. But if you were looking to build this rig yourself, you'd save about $1000 to $1500; certainly not a bad "fee" for a stable overclock, comprehensive liquid cooling, and not having to do it all yourself.

I'm something of a hardcore PC gamer, but this level of performance is leagues above anything I'd consider--better to save for a few more displays and a few months' rent. But the Medusa shows off what Primordial Computers is capable of, and it doesn't disappoint.

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Free Twitter/Facebook Manager SocialOomph Includes Useful Features

It's no secret that looks matter, even when it comes to the software and Web services we use. Take SocialOomph, for example. This social-media management service is held back by its plain-Jane interface, but if you can overlook this shortcoming, you'll find that it offers a pretty powerful set of features for managing your Twitter account.

SocialOomph is easy to use, but its interface is really lacking some oomph.Unlike rival TweetDeck, which is completely free, SocialOomph offers both free and paid versions. The free version is limited to managing Twitter accounts, while the Professional Account ($17.97, bi-weekly) adds support for Facebook and various blogging services, while also offering additional Twitter management tools. In addition to the Professional service, SocialOomph offers two additional paid subscriptions: one for its Twitter Advanced Scheduling Service ($12.97, bi-weekly) and another for its Auto-Follow & Auto-DM service for Twitter ($3.97, bi-weekly). This review focuses on the free version of SocialOomph.

The experience of using the unattractive, text-heavy SocialOomph is very different from navigating the slickly-designed TweetDeck, yet the end result is the same: Accessing the service's key features is pretty easy. You can easily schedule a tweet for future posting, and I like that you can save the text as a draft for future updates. The free version of SocialOoomph lets you manage an unlimited number of Twitter accounts, and it's very easy to switch between them--even more so than when using TweetDeck.

Even in its free version, SocialOomph emphasizes the social aspect of Twitter. It includes features for vetting new followers, allowing you to see information, such as the ratio of accounts they're following compared to how many followers they have, how many status updates they've posted, and when their account was created, among others.

SocialOomph also helps you promote yourself by offering you the ability to create an extended Twitter profile to provide more information about yourself. But all this does is send anyone who clicks on the Web link that appears on your Twitter profile to a page that's hosted on SocialOomph's site. Sure, you have the option to fill in the text, but you could do the same thing on your own Web site--and chances are good that you could make it look a lot better.

SocialOomph also offers a few features that will appeal to users who are looking to wipe their Twitter slate clean. It allows you to delete all of you tweets, without deleting any followers, and offers an option for purging your DM inbox.

SocialOomph's free features compare nicely with those of TweetDeck--as long you're looking to work with Twitter only. The free TweetDeck also include support for Facebook, something SocialOomph only offers in its Professional version. But its Facebook features are more extensive than TweetDeck's, as SocialOomph lets you schedule status updates and wall posts. Additional features in the Professional version include the ability to post tweets via email, as well as some security and business management tools.

Business users will appreciate the extra features that the Professional account offers, but SocialOomph's free version offers plenty to make Twitter power users happy. The service definitely suffers from its bland interface, which sometimes makes navigating its many features less than pleasant. But if you can deal with that flaw, SocialOomph has a lot to offer.

--Liane Cassavoy

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here