Canva review: Free tool brings much-needed simplicity to design process

Do you chomp at the bit to use design software? Unless design is your profession or hobby, our guess would be: not often. Those of us who aren't graphically inclined (example: Yaara) shrink from the complications of Photoshop, and even simpler programs take more effort than we're willing to expend. Those of us who design professionally (example: Erez) want powerful tools, but we're not sorry to take shortcuts if the results look right. If you need to make beautiful posters, invitations, cards, website graphics, or even multiple-page presentations, Canva is a design service you're going to want to use.

Still in invitation-only beta, Canva is a design service that takes the friction out of designing. All you have to do is choose one of 11 available templates or start from a custom-sized blank canvas. You then use the Layouts and Background tabs to get a rough idea of what you want to design. These tabs are chock-full of options to choose from, whether you want a complete template or just a nice background to build on.

Choose from the existing layouts, or design your own cavnas from scratch.

Canva revolves entirely around intuitive controls such as drag-and-drop, so adding, removing, and editing elements on your canvas is almost a no-brainer. This also means that if you’re used to design software giving you a hand with page grids and object distribution features, you’re out of luck. Canva does show live orientation guides as you drag objects around, but they are not as sophisticated as those used by online typesetting services such as LucidPress.

Canva's simple layout makes it easy to add and remove elements for the perfect design.

Use the search function to browse an enormous repository of images, and the Text tab to add free text or stylized text with built-in backgrounds. While many Canva elements are completely free to use, most images you’ll see on search results are Premium, and will cost you $1 per image once you download your design. You can, however, easily upload you own photos or graphics, or use ones you have on Facebook, so while Canva's Premium options are certainly tempting, they're not a must.

While working with premium images, Canva shows a pretty obtrusive watermark over photos.

Rather than overwhelm with options, Canva gives you just a handful of picks. This is evident in the built-in color picker as well: You can change the color used for text and some of the built-in glyphs, but you’re first only presented with a limited palette of 5-8 colors that fit your general color scheme. If you know the specific hue you’re after, you can click through for a more standard color picker that also lets you feed in a hex color code.

By default, Canva shows you only the basic features. Dig a bit deeper to find more advanced ones.

Canva is an amazing tool for the clueless, and can come in handy for professionals too. It makes designing uniformly easy for everyone, but it's by no means aimed only at amateurs. The simplicity and richness of the tools will get you coming back for more every day, and according to Canva's developers, the current features are only 1% of what they have in store for us.

As it is now, Canva brings sophisticated design abilities to the masses. We can only hope future features don’t render the service complicated to use. Hurry up and request your beta invite, this is one service you won't want to miss.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
More by Yaara Lancet

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: Process Hacker is task manager on steroids

Process Hacker 2.30 is a powerful replacement for Windows' Task Manager, and serves to provide both information and a way to shut down unwanted processes. It is aimed at users who have a basic understanding of system processes, resource usage, and so on, and may be of little use to users who are unfamiliar with these concepts. Since it allows users to shut down processes that other applications rely on, using it without at least some idea of what's going on could lead to system crashes or unexpected behavior.

The default Task Manager provides basic information, but Process Hacker goes well beyond it, while still keeping the interface clean and usable. Color coding helps identify, at a glance, what category a running process belongs to. Hovering over a process name provides the command line, the disk file, and what services the process is using. The network tab breaks down all processes using the network, their ports, and their bytes sent/received, among other things. The Disk tab shows all disk read/write access, broken down by the process which invoked it. Most of these tabs provide multiple options for fields displayed and how the data is to be sorted.

Process Hacker provides multiple displays of what's going on in your system.

Graphical displays of system resources are in a separate window. Process Hacker allows the user to toggle between a set of graphs showing each resource concurrently, or zoom in on one graph (such as network) in detail, while the others remain visible in minimized form in a side bar. Hovering over a section of the graph provides a pop-up detailing what was active at that point in time, so, if you see a sudden spike in disk activity, you can see what caused it.

Using Process Hacker, it is possible to suspend running processes, or to terminate them. Processes can be run as another user, provided the correct identifying information is given.

Selecting "Properties" on a process opens up a tabbed dialog full of options -- the clean main interface of Process Hacker does a good job of hiding the depth of features, allowing the user to drill down to a specific task instead of being overwhelmed with detail. Everything from the performance and resource usage of the process to what text strings can be found within it is available for display. The information here is extremely useful for debugging or isolating anomalies -- for example, one tab displays the values of all environmental variables as the process sees them, which may not always be the values expected, due to path or user settings.

Obviously, a lot of the information will be of value only to those who know specifically what to look for. Process Hacker doesn't try to guess what a user needs to see; it presents all the data it can, and trusts the user to skip over that which is meaningless. This leads to the only gripe I might have about Process Hacker, which is that documentation is basically non-existent. There's no help file; the user either knows what he's doing or figures it out on the go. There is an active forum and support community, which can help, but it's geared towards helping people with the tool itself, not with providing technical information about DLLs, threads, processes, and so on.

Process Hacker is free and actively supported. If you can't imagine why you'd want or need it, it's probably not for you. But if you regularly fire up Task Manager for any reason, replacing it with Process Hacker is pretty much a no-brainer.

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

Free Process Explorer: A Better Task Manager

Windows isn't just for hard-core geeks or just for novices. Being the most popular operating system on the planet, Microsoft must design it to fit the widest possible range of users. Even its "techy" parts, like the Task Manager, sometimes need to be toned down for general consumption. But what if Windows were aimed only at the most technical of users? Process Explorer is the Task Manager that could have been.

Process Explorer offers a wealth of information about every process running on your computer.Process Explorer can do all kinds of tricks that Task Manager just can't do. Case in point: Fire up Task Manager right now (hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc), and click "Show processes from all users." You will doubtlessly see a bunch of processes called "svchost.exe," all helpfully labelled "Host Process for Windows Services." Great, but what are those services? With Process Explorer, you can find out just by mousing over the process name.

This may sound like an obscure technical detail (and it is, a little bit), but it can also be very useful. For example, on my system there's a single svchost.exe process taking up over 250MB of RAM--a sizable chunk by any measure. Thanks to Process Explorer, I no longer have to wonder what all that memory is used for: I know exactly what services hide under that process, and can disable them if I want to.

Another very neat Process Explorer capability: graphing GPU usage. Task Manager's Performance tab lets you see CPU and RAM usage only, but if you have a discrete graphics card, you have at least one more powerful (if dedicated) processor. Monitoring the GPU is useful not only for benchmarking games, but also for keeping an eye on applications such as Bitcoin or BOINC that use the GPU for general-purpose calculations. You can also see how much of the GPU's dedicated memory is used.

When going over the list of currently running processes, unfamiliar names will doubtlessly pop up. For example, do you know what csrss.exe is? I can guarantee this process is running on your system right now, under the nebulous description "Client Server Runtime Process." With Process Explorer, you just need to click the process and press Ctrl-M, and Process Explorer will instantly search Google for that process name. It's a very handy way to find out what's what in that long list.

Here's another classic Windows annoyance: You're trying to delete or overwrite a file, but Windows insists the file is in use. Process Explorer lets you see exactly what files are used by every process in your system, and also search for a file or DLL. In other words, you can track down the process that is using that file and kill it if you want to.

Process Explorer looks a bit intimidating at first, and it's an acquired taste. You can start off by using it just like Task Manager and gradually grow into its unique capabilities. It even has an option called "Replace Task Manager." Once you use Process Explorer regularly, you may well use that option. Highly recommended.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can obtain the latest version of this software.

--Erez Zukerman

Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.

The Process Explorer display consists of two sub-windows. The top window always shows a list of the currently active processes, including the names of their owning accounts, whereas the information displayed in the bottom window depends on the mode that Process Explorer is in: if it is in handle mode you'll see the handles that the process selected in the top window has opened; if Process Explorer is in DLL mode you'll see the DLLs and memory-mapped files that the process has loaded. Process Explorer also has a powerful search capability that will quickly show you which processes have particular handles opened or DLLs loaded.

The unique capabilities of Process Explorer make it useful for tracking down DLL-version problems or handle leaks, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.

Note: This link takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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