Review: Disc Soft takes on virtual hard drives with Daemon Tools Ultra

Daemon Tools' disreputable younger days as a hacking tool seem a speck in the rearview mirror now. Arriving at what appears to be the new top of the pyramid for single users is the $45 Daemon Tools Ultra, but there's more, and less, here than meets the eye.

Disk Soft wants you to feel special, so the installation procedure is packed with golden moments like this.

You've got to imagine the word "Diversification" is mentioned frequently over at Disc Soft Ltd these days. After years of static prices and singular release schedules, they've gathered an armful of new products under the Daemon Tools banner and have their market segmentation tuned finely enough to impress a Toyota executive. A cursory glance turns up 10 titles on the products page, some with prices close to $250 for corporate site licenses.

The new interface is commendably clean, except for the ad bar. This can be turned off via the Preferences menu.

In the plus column, Disc Soft Ltd has added Virtual Hard Drive support to Daemon Tools Ultra, allowing users to create and access hard disk drive files as if they were physical devices attached the system. Protocol support is expanded as well, including iSCSI implementation for networked image hosts via either Disc Soft's own Daemon Tools Net or other iSCSI compliant hosting solutions. Operation is swift and reliable, with Ultra mounting a wide variety of images during testing and new features working as expected. Popular optical emulation modes perform as robustly as here as in other versions. However, that's not the case with features across the board.

You can add dynamically sized virtual hard disks to the feature list in Ultra.

Daemon Tools 5 Pro users will find functionality missing from the Ultra version "upgrade," including the ability to master bootable disks images or discs, USB stick portable execution modes, command line interface scripting and other power user features. Licensing restrictions prevent users with multiple copies from performing selective upgrades. It's either all Ultra, or all older versions. Word from Disc Soft Ltd indicates Ultra is a work in progress:

"This is just first version which introduced new way of mounting. If users will like it, then we may add more features so no functionality will be lost compared to Pro"  

And on licensing issues the company says:

"By purchasing an upgrade you will get a license of DAEMON Tools Ultra with a new serial number, that is always available at My Licenses page. Your current license will be blocked.

About Multi-Instance License. Instance is considered as a License copy, which may be installed and used on one operating system. So, there is no ability update 1 instance."

This beta-test approach is ill-advised given the product is commercially themed, has been officially released, and is one of the most expensive in their catalog. Also off-key is the fickle attitude displayed towards future development.  All the "may" and "if" language suggests support is likely to be based on popularity rather than any sense of responsibility towards existing, paying customers.

Image format conversion is supported only in Ultra, Net, and Pro versions (not the popular free version),

Adding injury to insult are the multiple attempts during installation to insert third party "browser bar" style software nonsense which makes the asked $45 investment feel exploitative. The good ideas and new features on display here don't outweigh this cynical approach. Unless you need VHD and iSCSI support, hang on to your current version until Disc Soft commits. If they won't, why should you?

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

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

Review: Virtual Piggy makes e-commerce child's play

Virtual Piggy Virtual Piggy, a safe online payment system for kids, is a great idea in need of some fine-tuning.

Download Now

The idea behind Virtual Piggy is solid: This cloud-based service, which is designed to help children shop online safely and securely, allows for communication between parents and children, and protects children from many of the dangers lurking online without zapping their sense of independence. But right now it suffers from a few glitches that may make it hard for some kids—especially those on the younger end—to use without frustration.

Virtual Piggy is free to use. Parents sign up for an account, and then create profiles for each child they'd like to use the service. This requires entering the child's name and date of birth, and then creating a username and password for that child.

The parent can set certain parameters for the child's online shopping, such as transaction limits (both in dollar amounts for individual transactions and per day or week), and approval settings (which means the service will notify you whenever your child makes a transaction that is either above a certain amount or with a certain merchant). You also link a payment method—a credit card or a PayPal account—to your child's profile and set a monthly allowance, which is the maximum amount the child can spend each month.

Virtual Piggy's child dashboard shows the user how much they have left to spend, and which merchants they're allowed to shop at.

Virtual Piggy has relationships with a group of online retailers that sell everything from games and books to clothes and more. These retailers, which include big-ish names like Ty.com (maker of Beanie Babies) and lesser-known sites like R&R Games, have agreed to allow children to use their Virtual Piggy accounts for checkout.

When they agree to work with Virtual Piggy, the retail sites decide which age children they'll work with. Using this information, Virtual Piggy creates a list of retailers that are age-appropriate for your child when you sign them up. You can delete sites from the child's account, but you cannot add others. Virtual Piggy says that it respects the retailers' limits on child ages.

When your child logs in to their Virtual Piggy account, their dashboard shows them, in a large, colorful graphic, how much money they have left to spend. It also shows them their virtual savings account, which is defined by a goal you set up when creating their account. The child can transfer some of their spending money into this savings bucket, but the result is entirely virtual. They're not actually taking money from your credit card or linked payment account and putting it in a savings account, they're simply showing you how much they'd save. It's slightly confusing, even for adults.

The Virtual Piggy payment button, shown here as it appears on Knex.com, allows children to make purchases without entering any personal data.

I expected the shopping aspect to be a bit less confusing, but was stymied a bit here, too. I created a Virtual Piggy account for a 7-year-old boy, and linked a PayPal account as a funding source. When I logged in to his dashboard, I saw the list of available stores, but all were marked as "blocked." I used the option to send an approval request to the parent, but got a system error that surely would have perplexed a child. It wasn't until the next day that I was able to send the approval request properly—something the company attributes to a minor bug.

Once the approval requests came through (they arrive via email and in your Virtual Piggy account, as all of the service's notifications do), I was able to figure out that the merchants were not approved because none of them accepted PayPal, and that was the only funding source I'd added. Once I linked a credit card to my account, the stores were approved for the child to shop at.

Shopping takes you out of the Virtual Piggy site, but the child is not left defenseless. All of the merchants are supposed to have buttons on their site that allow the child to pay with Virtual Piggy, much the way you could select pay with PayPal as an option at some retailers. The child only has to enter their Virtual Piggy user name and password, and the transaction details are handled between the retailer and Virtual Piggy. If the transaction meets all of your approved settings, it goes through automatically, shipping to the address you've designated. If it needs approval, a notification is sent allowing the parent to approve or decline the purchase.

In theory, this process sounds great. But it didn't always work quite as seamlessly for me. When I attempted to make a purchase from Knex.com, it worked well. The site had an easily identifiable Pay with Virtual Piggy button, and the service notified me of the transaction. But when my child tried to shop at Fathead.com, the site didn't have a Virtual Piggy button to be found, something the folks at Virtual Piggy say might be due to an update in process at that retailer.

Overall, Virtual Piggy is a great idea in need of some fine-tuning. It could benefit from adding more retailers, something the company says is continually happening. And the folks at Virtual Piggy say they are working on overhauling the service from a usability point of view for children, something that will go a long way toward making Virtual Piggy the service it deserves to be.

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

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

Review: Dexpot makes virtual desktops feel like a native part of Windows

Large desktop workstations often have more than enough screen real-estate: One or two 24-inch monitors afford plenty of room for a mission-critical application, plus several chat or email windows alongside. But if you're a laptop user squeaking by with a single 15-inch monitor (or perhaps something even smaller), a virtual desktop might be the next best thing to an extra monitor. Dexpot (25 Euros, which is $33 on 2/21/12; free for personal use) is a great way to get yourself one. Or five.

Dexpot's taskbar plugin lets you control virtual desktops without having to use a special window.

If I had to describe Dexpot in one word, I'd pick "customizable." I can't think of a single aspect of Dexpot you can't customize: the animation (or lack thereof) used to switch between virtual desktops, the number of desktops, hotkeys and hot corners for switching desktops using keyboard and mouse, whether or not a virtual desktop spans all your monitors are just one, and the list goes on.

When an application decides to go all-out on customization, the result is usually bloat. Dexpot tries to let you eat your cake and have it, too, by compartmentalizing features into plug-ins you can enable or disable as you prefer. Disable the animations plug-in, and sure enough, the animations go away—and so do the options for controlling them. So not only can you customize the options to your liking, you can customize whether or not the options are even there to begin with.

Using virtual desktops productively is a learned skill. That's because it's a paradox: A GUI assumes being able to see your applications. Hide them in an imaginary desktop, and you might well forget to come back to them later. To overcome this, Dexpot includes visual hints keeping the virtual desktops and the applications they contain in view. True to form, Dexpot offers several such features, ranging from a tiny indicator in the system tray showing the number of the desktop you're on, through a compact desktop switcher built into the Windows taskbar, all the way to an Exposé-like feature that tiles your screen with scaled-down versions of all windows from all desktops, so you can easily click the one you want without having to think what desktop it's on (you can't get to it by typing its title, though). There's also a full-screen preview mode, subdividing the screen into separate desktops which you can then drag windows between.

The Full-Screen Preview mode zooms out so you can see all virtual desktops on one physical screen and drag windows around.

When relegating a window to another virtual desktop, some users prefer to have it disappear from the Alt-Tab task switcher and taskbar; others prefer to have it stay there. Dexpot leaves this up to you, making it easy to experiment.

The Window Catalog is similar to Exposé on the Mac, putting miniatures of all of your windows on the screen at once.

Dexpot's staggering array of plug-ins and fine-grained configuration options means that to benefit from the application you need only agree with its basic premise, that virtual desktops can be a useful thing. The rest is negotiable, flexible, and adjustable.

If you've got a keyboard shortcut obsession, Dexpot would be happy to oblige your every whim.

Being able to customize everything means you might have to experiment with Dexpot for some time, until you hit a combination of settings that make sense for you. But if you take the time to do this, you might realize that a single 15-inch monitor is not so small after all.

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

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

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

OnLive Desktop: Virtual Office Apps on Your iPad

OnLive Desktop uses technology developed for its parent OnLive gaming service, which lets you stream high-end video games (that you rent or purchase) to your PC in much the way you'd get an on-demand movie from Netflix. Instead of games, OnLive Desktop streams a virtual Windows desktop outfitted with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer, Windows Paint and Calculator, and Microsoft Surface Collage.

Like CloudOn, OnLive Desktop runs the applications on its servers, sending to its mobile apps only the data that Windows sends to a PC's graphics subsystem. That display data is tweaked to fit on the iPad or on an Android tablet screen. You simply install the OnLive mobile app and log in, and a Windows desktop appears.

In my tests on a new iPad, OnLive's expertise with streaming media showed to particular advantage in its version of Internet Explorer, which can capably display a lot of video that you either need a special app for--or can't get at all--on the iPad. ABC's show Missing looked great in OnLive Desktop (you have to get the ABC iPad app to see it otherwise), as did NBC's Saturday Night Live (NBC doesn't support the iPad at all). You can also create bookmarks that will reappear whenever you log in.

But the OnLive version of IE isn't perfect. It couldn't log me in to a Flash-based game (the connection dropped when I tried). I didn't run into that problem with the version of IE on the competing Nivio service. (OnLive says its version of IE can't run JavaScript, which may have been the issue.)

OnLive Desktop made no apparent effort to resolve problems involved in squeezing the Microsoft Office Ribbon onto the iPad's touchscreen display. Because some Ribbon icons are quite small, it's easy to tap the wrong one--an issue that CloudOn addresses by tweaking the Ribbon to enlarge icons (and, in at least one case, by creating a new tab to accommodate the overflow).

More annoyingly, OnLive Desktop's included 2GB of free file storage can be a hassle to use. The problem isn't on the iPad end of things--all documents you create or edit in OnLive Desktop automatically save to your OnLive Files folder, accessible in any browser when you log in to desktop.onlive.com. But if you want to work with a document on a PC, you must download it to the PC, and then upload it when you're done to make the new version available on the tablet. There's no equivalent to the Dropbox service that CloudOn uses, which automatically synchronizes documents saved to a folder on your hard drive. (In fact, you might be better off forgoing OnLive's storage and using Dropbox via IE.)

Also, OnLive's uncertain licensing situation for Microsoft Office is troubling, especially for business users. Microsoft has said that OnLive Desktop doesn't have the license it needs to offer Office apps to consumers. OnLive recently switched from using the Windows 7 desktop to using Windows Server. Microsoft applauded the move, saying, "We will work with OnLive to take a closer look at its service and ensure it is operating according to its license." An OnLive spokesperson said that the company isn't commenting on the issue.

OnLive Desktop's free version comes with 2GB of file storage and access to the Office apps and Windows utilities, but to use IE--one of the service's best features--you have to upgrade to the $5-a-month Plus service. That isn't too expensive, but I wish OnLive had put a little more thought into usability; as is, the Office apps aren't as easy to use on a tablet as they need to be.

A final caveat: OnLive's website says that people with the free account will have only "as-available" access to the desktop. This means you might encounter significant lag if a lot of paid users are hitting the servers at any given moment.

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Speaktoit Assistant Review: Your All-In-One Virtual Assistant

Speaktoit Assistant is a virtual buddy for your Android device that uses natural language technology to answer questions, find information, and connect you with various web services, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and many others.

The Assistant works with your smartphone to get maps, search for news and images, look up weather reports, convert currency and measurements, send email, and much more.

No need to memorize special commands or complex interfaces - simply speak or type in everyday language and the Assistant will understand and respond with what you need.

Compare to Siri, Nuance, Dragon, Vlingo, Voice Actions, Voice Search, Wolfram Alpha, IBM Watson.

This is a beta version - if the assistant doesn't answer some of your questions we will fix it really soon.

Keywords: chat, speak, talk, talking, speak to it, chatbot, voice, speaking, speech, assistant, concierge

Recent changes:

Added translation from English

Minor bug fixes

Content rating: Low Maturity

Speaktoit Assistant Screenshotsby Brent W. Hopkins, PCWorld

Speaktoit Assistant is an Android app that in many ways resembles Apple's Siri for iPhone 4S. It acts as a virtual assistant that can respond to voice commands and perform Web searches and other simple tasks. You can use Speaktoit Assistant to launch apps, find contacts, compose email or text messages, create calendar events, give directions, and more.

Speaktoit Assistant uses Google's voice transcription service to understand your spoken commands. The app lets you choose from among several iSpeech voices, all of which sound a bit more natural than Google's robotic-sounding text-to-speech (TTS) service. I ended up settling on a female voice with a British accent that I found quite pleasant and easy to understand.

The app has a fun feature that allows you to design a custom avatar for your assistant. The avatar doesn't do anything functional, but it does give the app a bit more personality and puts a face on screen to go along with the app's voice.

Speaktoit Assistant is easy to use: Simply press the onscreen microphone and tell the app what you'd like it to do. Like Siri, Speaktoit Assistant has a sassy personality and will occasionally offer somewhat snarky responses.

But even though Speaktoit Assistant is one of the best and most versatile voice-powered apps I've used, it had some hiccups and limitations. At times I had to repeat my commands multiple times or manually type them in, in order for Speaktoit Assistant to understand me. Also, the app could not read email or text messages aloud--a feature I had hoped would be included.

Still, overall, Speaktoit Assistant is a good voice-controlled app that supports a fair amount of integration with other Android apps. If you want a Siri-like app on your 'droid, this is one of your better options. Though Speaktoit Assistant doesn't work as a truly hands-free means to control your phone, it's a step in the right direction.

Follow Brent W. Hopkins on Twitter, or read more articles by Brent W. Hopkins.

Thank you for reviewing Speaktoit Assistant. Your review will be visible in a few minutes.

Speaktoit Assistant Screenshots

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here