Software
RBS 6 Nations Live Challenge App Review
February 12, 2013
The RBS 6 Nations Rugby Championship is now well and truly underway and now thanks to their collection of apps for various platforms, you can keep up-to-date with the very latest team news and live scores whichever of the popular smartphones or tablets you might have.
However, in addition to just doing the usual job of providing live game information and news between games with their standard app, the RBS 6 Nations Live Challenge App takes watching the live game on TV to a whole more interactive experience!
Continue reading »Boxee 1.5 For Windows, Mac And Linux Review
January 7, 2012
I’m a huge fan of Boxee’s media centre software, having used it for three years now. Since the release of the Boxee Box in 2010, however, development of the PC version has suffered from a lack of support and updates.
We’ve been promised Boxee 1.0, the same version that originally shipped on the Boxee Box, for over a year now, but it turns out that all this time the Boxee team was hard at work creating Boxee 1.5 for the PC instead, bringing it right in line with the software that’s currently available on the set top box. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this update is the last that we’ll see Boxee ship for the PC, as the company is now focusing all of its resources on the Boxee Box instead, which you can’t really blame them for as that’s where the revenue is. So is Boxee 1.5 for PC the grand finale that we’ve all been waiting for, or is it an anti-climax to compete with LOST’s finale? Let’s take a look and find out!
Continue reading »How To Enable Text Copying In OS X’s Quick Look
January 5, 2012
Quick Look is a feature that was introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and has remained part of the operating system since, receiving a facelift in the latest release, Mac OS X 10.7.
If you’re browsing through your files in Finder and you’d like to preview a file before opening it, you can simply hit the spacebar and see it without opening a full program. You can’t, however, copy text from within that file. Not by default anyway.
Continue reading »Invisor For Mac Review
January 4, 2012
I really dislike optical media. This partly stems from the fact that I am incredibly clumsy and tend to have a tech-related accident at least three times a week, and it also stems from the amount of space that optical media takes in cupboards and on shelves and underneath televisions. You get the idea.
So for any one of the reasons listed above, I do my best to keep optical media at a minimum. To ensure I don’t compromise on quality, a big part of this effort involves remuxing (ripping, without compression) my blu-ray discs with MakeMKV whilst keeping the original video and audio tracks uncompressed and at the best quality possible.
Continue reading »Sparrow 1.5 For Mac Review
January 4, 2012
The last time we looked at Sparrow for the Mac, it was fresh off its original release and creating quite a bit of buzz on various blogs and social networks. It takes a lot of good design work to take email down to a Twitter sized client but the Sparrow team managed it well, creating an application that was as minimalist as possible whilst doing a lot of the things a full sized client such as Mail or Postbox could do.
Despite this, there were a few key features missing from Sparrow when it first launched, and the user interface had a tendency to be a little too simple at times. With this in mind, the Sparrow team has just updated the application to version 1.5 and there are a number of new features well worth checking out, so let’s get to it!
Continue reading »Sky Sports News iPad App (2012) Review
January 3, 2012
With the current football season well under way and an exciting FA Cup weekend fast approaching, BSkyB has launched a brand new Sky Sports app for the iPad, which takes a lot of cues from the existing Sky News app that was released on the iPad in the Spring of last year.
Curiously, the old Sky Sports News app which is compatible with both the iPhone and iPad has remained on the App Store, with this new version simply being called “Sky Sports News for iPad” in the App Store. Not to bother, we’ve gotten around that particular confusion and installed the app so that you can see all the good and bad things that it has to offer!
Continue reading »Are You Running Out Of Hard Disk Storage Space? Check Your Cache Files!
January 2, 2012
Digital storage space has become less of an issue in the past few years. You can pick up a 2TB hard drive for next to nothing and add it to existing collections of storage, with the potential of a RAID array consisting of enough space to hold an entire Blu-ray movie collection.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for solid state drives. Although these new storage drives are coming down in price compared to what they cost at this point a couple of years ago, they aren’t cheap enough for you to be truly frivolous with your data.
Continue reading »Postbox 3 For Mac and Windows Review
January 1, 2012
Around this time last year, we took a look at an email client for Mac and Windows called Postbox. Expectations were set rather high with the application costing £25, which is unusually steep for an email client. Despite this, we were won over by some advanced features, such as image and attachment searching, that can’t be found in other free clients.
This time around, we’re looking at the new Postbox 3, which has been given an overhaul to compete with the new Mail 5 found in Lion.
Continue reading »Windows Store Launching With Windows 8 Public Beta In February 2012
December 7, 2011
Developers (developers, developers!), take note! You have until February to get your Windows 8 application in a decent shape, because that’s when the Windows 8 App Store will launch with the public beta of Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating system.
The store adopts a similar revenue sharing model to existing app stores, with Microsoft taking a 30% cut of the revenue made on all new applications. The good news for high fliers is that once you’ve made $25,000 on the store, that cut will be reduced to 20%, meaning that you’ll take home 80% of the revenue made from your app.
Continue reading »Microsoft To Release Windows 8 Public Beta In February 2012
December 7, 2011
This isn’t entirely unexpected, but it’s certainly good to have a solid date to look forward to. Microsoft has announced that the public beta of Windows 8 will commence in February 2012.
MiniLyrix For Mac OS X Review
December 6, 2011
With so many sources of music available on the internet, it’s no surprise that iTunes libraries continue to grow and grow (and grow and grow), but despite all of this music in our libraries, there aren’t many programs out there that can provide you with lyrics to the song that you’re currently listening to.
MiniLyrix is a very small (0.5mb) application which is available from the Mac App Store, and it pulls all of the lyrics information from the id3 tags of the track which is currently playing. This means that if you have an unorganised mess of a music library, this isn’t an application that you’ll want to use. For the perfectionists among us who have perfectly tagged libraries, read on.
Continue reading »CleanMyMac Will Be Available For Half Price On Black Friday
November 23, 2011
I reviewed CleanMyMac for Mac OS X back in 2010, and found it to be one of the best utilities available for those using Apple’s desktop operating system.
The only problem for most people is the price: at £24.95 for a license, it’s one of the more expensive applications that you’re going to buy, especially now that the Mac App Store has arrived and driven down the price of software from a lot of developers.
Continue reading »iOS 5 For iPhone Review
October 12, 2011
Two good things happened at Apple’s event earlier this month: firstly, we finally got to see the new iPhone which, although not as extravagant as the rumour mill would have had us believe, is a great jump from the previous iPhone thanks to the introduction of Siri in iOS 5. Secondly, we actually got a release date for iOS 5, and it will be landing on an iPhone near you today!
If you’re a little cautious about downloading new software before reading some reviews first, then worry not, because we’ve done all of the leg work for you!
Note: This review does not include ‘Siri’, the voice control software found on the new iPhone 4S. If you want to read about Siri, head over to our iPhone 4S review, and you will find all of our thoughts there.
Continue reading »Facebook iPad App Review
October 10, 2011
We’ve known about its existence for months already, and we’ve even seen it accidentally bundled and leaked with the iPhone application, but we now, finally, have an official Facebook application in the iPad App Store.
Launched today, the app is a free download, and it’s available as a universal application which is compatible with both the Apple iPad and iPhone.
Continue reading »iOS 5 To Be Released For iPhone, iPad And iPod Touch On October 12th
October 4, 2011
It seems like we’ve waited ages for iOS 5 to eventually reach the ‘golden master’ stage, when in fact it’s only been 4 months since it was originally announced back at WWDC in June.
Fortunately for any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch users out there, iOS 5 has reached that milestone today, and it now has a firm release date of October 12th. Need a refresher on the features that you can look forward to in the new OS? We’ve got you covered!
Continue reading »Apple Announces Find My Friends App For iOS 5
October 4, 2011
Do you value your privacy? If you do, then you might want to look away sometime soon, as Apple has just announced a new feature which will be coming to iOS 5: Find My Friends.
All privacy jokes aside, Find My Friends looks like quite an interesting feature. If you’re meeting friends and want to find them, you can ask them to turn the feature on from their iPhone, and they will become visible on a map, enabling you to find them.
Continue reading »Apple Announces Cards App For iOS
October 4, 2011
We already saw what iOS 5 will have to offer in June, but at their event today, Apple announced an additional application for the upcoming operating system: Cards.
Cards is, essentially, a service which is similar to UK offerings such as moonpig.com, through which you can create and customise your own cards from your browser and then send them to the person of your choice.
Using the app, which will be a separate download to iOS 5, users will be able to create and (snail) mail cards to recipients straight from their iPhone. All of the cards can be customised with custom pictures and text from your iPhone, and will be printed on high quality paper before being sent.
Continue reading »Windows Phone ‘Mango’ Starts To Roll Out to a Lucky Few
September 27, 2011
It seems an insufferably long time since I finally managed to install the ‘NoDo’ update onto my Windows Phone, after as many problems as you’ve got time for, but now it’s time for another update to Windows Phone and this one brings a lot more to the table than just something as trivial as copy & paste.
PC Tools Performance Toolkit For Windows Review
September 8, 2011
I’ve always been skeptical of so called ‘tune-up’ programs for Windows. There are quite a few of them, such as Uniblue Registry Booster, around from various software companies, but how much good to they actually do?
Whether it’s worth your while purchasing a tune-up program for your PC depends on how long you’ve been using it without formatting the hard drive, and why it’s running slowly. Of course many people like to stay on top of these things and run programs such as Performance Toolkit as a preventative measure, so that there are no registry errors present to slow down your system. If you want to use a tune-up program, and you’re interested in Performance Toolkit, read on to see what we make of it!
Continue reading »Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 Premium For Windows Review
September 7, 2011
This time last year at Zath, we reviewed Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 and found it to be one of the best speech recognition options available on the market despite its high resource usage. This year, we’re back with the latest version of the software, NaturallySpeaking 11.5, to see how it compares to its predecessor and whether any of the updated features can further tempt consumers to buy in to the speech recognition scene.
The new version is a free update for existing users of version 11, but it is also shipping as a boxed product for buyers who haven’t used the previous version before.
Continue reading »