Final Draft 8 for Windows review: Screenwriting software ready for its close-up

Protip: Before you start rehearsing your acceptance speech for Best Screenplay, you have to actually write the screenplay. You'll have to bring your own brilliant ideas, but Final Draft can help with the format.

Final Draft 8's Elements picklist makes it easy to get started.

Scripts have unique formatting requirements, and a host of specialized word processing packages have sprung up to meet screenwriters' needs. Most studios have strict requirements for script submission, so this is one area where it's wise to start with the industry standard and stick with it. Creativity is prized, but only in the script itself...not in its format.

Keep tabs on your changes with the revision tracker.

Fortunately, Final Draft, the screenwriting industry's tool of choice, is a pleasure to use. Its dialogs may not look glamorous, but this program houses a full-featured script editor, scene navigation tools, voice readback controls with multiple vocal styles, special printing formats, and a collaborative mode that lets you host or join a multi-user writing session with other people working on the same project. There's a Mac edition as well.

While the demo mode does a good job showing what the software is like to use, its limitations mean spending the stiff $250 asking price before any worthwhile commercial work can be accomplished. That's Hollywood, baby.

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Nvidia Tegra 4i Hits 150 Mbps in Demo, Ready for LTE Advanced and AT&T

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How to Get Your Laptop Ready for BioShock Infinite

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From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

App Gets You Ready for Voting Day

To keep you in the know, her organization and four others have created a Web app for smartphones called Election Protection, available in app stores such as Google Play or for download from your smartphone’s browser at app.866ourvote.org. (You will need that link for iPhones, because it is not yet in the App Store.)

It allows you to register to vote, find your polling place and look up laws and regulations for your state. In California for example, you have to register at least 15 days before the election. In New  York, it’s 25 days before. (And you still need to fill out a paper form, so you can’t use the registration part of the Election Protection app in the Empire State. In fact, only 10 states allow pure online registration.)

“Don’t wait till you get to the poling place to find out if you’re registered,” said Barbara Arnwine of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, another organization behind the app.

[SEE ALSO: "Romney and Obama Take the Campaign to Smartphones"]

Election Protection is handy for anyone, but the creators are especially targeting populations — African Americans and Latinos — that they say have been underrepresented at the polling place. Some African Americans, for example, participate in “souls to the polls” by going from their churches and voting early on Sunday, said Arnwine. So they have to know their state’s rules for early voting.

The app also provides a way for people to contact an Election Protection hotline for help in case they run into bureaucratic snags at the polling place.

The organizers say that they are targeting smartphones because the devices are so popular in the African American and Latino cultures they are trying to help.

“In many ways, they’ve bypassed the computer and gone right to their mobile phones,” said Heather Smith from Rock the Vote. “And we need to take everything we’ve done online and move to the smartphone.”

Initially, the organizations have literally taken their websites to the phone. Election Protection is a Web app — essentially a website that acts like a full-fledged app. The voter registration portion, for example, reproduces the Web forms on Rock the Vote’s website.

That allows it to work on pretty much any smartphone: all it needs is an up-to-date browser. When people go to, say, the Google Play app market, they are essentially downloading an icon that they can click to launch the website.

And if voters don’t have a smartphone, they can also go the old-fashioned way and call for help at 866-OUR-VOTE.

Article provided by TechNewsDaily, a sister site to Laptopmag.com.

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Open-source Freeware Fave GIMP Ready to Take on Photoshop

GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is an entirely free, open-source image editor and creator that---now in its seventeenth year of development---finally seems ready to take on the big guns. Criticized for years for being too oddball, too unstable, too un-Photoshop-like, GIMP has finally edged its way into the mainstream. Yes, it's still really different from Photoshop, but after two decades of Photoshop, is that really a bad thing?

Like any detailed image editor and creator, GIMP is a little hard to get the hang of, but time spent is worth it for great-looking images with relative ease.I felt a little lost when I first opened GIMP 2.6.11. For a Photoshop user, it's a little like visiting a foreign country for the first time: Some things seem familiar and others are not. Fortunately, GIMP's tool box includes tips when you hover over a tool; and the options for the tool appear in the lower half of the tool box when you make your selection. Also, the tutorials available on GIMP's website can help.

For basic image manipulation, GIMP makes it easy to adjust brightness, colors, contrast, crop, etc. GIMP includes a wide selection of built-in filters and effects, like blur, distort, colorize, and transform. Unlike Serif PhotoPlus X5 or Xara Photo & Graphic Designer (both $90 high-end image editors) there are no shortcuts like red eye remover or Cut Out Studio (PhotoPlus X5), which is a shame because I think GIMP would do them well.

Once you get the hang of the layers system in GIMP, creating original artwork begins and ends with your skill level. GIMP's painting and fine art filters produce moderately nice results, but it you're really interested in creating fine art from photographs, try partnering GIMP with FotoSketcher (free), a basic image editor that excels at this.

GIMP is purely a raster program, but there are also a vast selection of drawing and painting tools included. Unlike Paint.NET, another free and open-source image editing and painting program, you don't have to search the internet for the plugins you need: Most will have already been incorporated into GIMP.

There are little things to dislike about GIMP: When you minimize the program, for example, the floating tool boxes remain floating in the middle of your monitor. You can open as many images as you want, but there's no way to easily locate or keep track of them.

Subtle things about GIMP show it's not being created by someone following trends, but rather by a group of people who are passionate about making GIMP better than the trends. GIMP's image open dialog box is a perfect example of this: the navigation is smooth, and it's really easy to see where you are and where you need to be. For a Windows user who's frustrated by the Microsoft trend to make everything as pretty, overloaded, and confusing (Windows Vista or 7 file navigation, for example), GIMP is a blast of fresh air.

If you've never used Photoshop, GIMP is a worthy program for image editing and manipulation. If you're a Photoshop expert, and have either become disillusioned with Adobe and/or its habit of making you $700 or so poorer on a regular basis, GIMP is still a viable alternative, but it comes at its own price: Forget everything you've ever known about image editing and learn from scratch. But with the money you'll save, you can buy a lot of coffee for those long nights ahead.

--Clare Brandt

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