Simplify your laptop buying
The woefully incomplete Louvre app for iPhone offers little to smile about.
J'adore France and the French people. But I'm pretty disappointed with Musee du Louvre, a free but painfully brief virtual tour of the famous museum.
The app consists of four main sections. In Louvre: The Visit, you get a video tour of seven well-known areas of the museum, including The Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa.
However, each "tour" lasts less than 20 seconds, and the default language is French. If you tap the screen to bring up the controls and then tap the language icon, you can select English (or German or Japanese), but there's no way to make it the default. You have to perform this step for each video, each time you watch it.
In Artworks, you get a Cover Flow-style selection of famous paintings--but only 20 of them. Tap one to get information about the work, a zoom-and-pan-able full-screen view, and a map showing its location within the museum.
The Palace follows the same format, but focuses on areas of the Louvre itself rather than individual artworks.
Finally, there's the prerequisite visitor information, including hours and admission fees--but no maps to or of the museum (save for the aforementioned few).
Musee du Louvre does let you bookmark any item for easy reference, but with so little content, this seems rather pointless. Hopefully the curators developers will turn this incomplete tease of an app into the rich, arts-friendly resource it should be.
In the meantime, anyone planning a visit to the actual museum would be much better served by Rick Steves' Louvre Tour ($4.99).
If you're a fan of comic books, you should also be a fan of the iPhone. Apple's smartphone is home to several neat comic-book apps designed specifically for those who want to enjoy harrowing stories of their favorite heroes in the Digital Age.
I've sifted through the many apps related to comic books and found a handful that you'll want to try out. Whether you're a DC Comics fan or you're partial to Marvel, I think you'll like what you find in these apps.
Get your comic on
Clickwheel Comic Reader if you plan to read comic books on your iPhone, the Clickwheel Comic Reader will be able to satisfy that desire.
When you start using Clickwheel Comic Reader, you'll be able to sift through comic books and find one you want to read. The app doesn't have many of the classics like those you would find from an app like Comics or iVerse Comics (see below), but it does have some comic books you might care about. Either way, the app displays all your favorite content in full color on your iPhone. And since it's free, it's probably worth trying out if you don't mind reading a relatively small collection of books.
If you want to read some comic books, Clickwheel might be your choice.
(Credit: Clickwheel)Comic Envi If you're more into comic strips than comic books, we have you covered too.
With the help of Comic Envi, you can check out some of your favorite comic strips. You can check out old, well-known comic strips, Web-only offerings, and more. You have the option of viewing them in a slideshow or by moving them with your fingers. You can also check out the daily updated strips or some of the titles in the archive. It's a neat utility, but beware that you will need to pay 99 cents to get it.
Check out Comic Strips with the help of Comic Envi.
(Credit: Comic Envi)Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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CNET)
If you are an iTunes fan with a large library of music, chances are you have several songs with missing tags and cover art. Most people get their music from a number of sources, making it inevitable that some of your music doesn't have the right tags. While you could go in and fill in the genre, album name, and artist fields by hand, a huge library would take a long time to get through--not to mention all the time it would take searching for all the missing album artwork.
TuneUp Companion (Windows or Mac) is a plug-in for iTunes that does all the tedious tagging and cover art retrieval work for you. In addition to cleaning up your library, TuneUp offers the "Tuniverse," which locates videos, concert tickets, and news on the Web about selected bands. You also can find out when the artist of the currently playing track has a concert coming up in your area. I wrote about an early version of the software in June of last year, and while it did a fairly good job of cleaning up tags and cover art, I didn't think it was quite ready for prime time.
TuneUp Companion shows up right along side of iTunes so it's easy to drag and drop tracks for cleaning
(Credit: CNET)Well, the folks at TuneUp Media announced today they have streamlined TuneUp Companion and added a new look and extra features to sweeten the deal. Along with the cleaner interface, users will now be able to choose which metadata to save through TuneUp Companion's newly added field-specific cleaning. Other tweaks include the ability to disable greatest hits compilations in search results and Mac users will now be able to choose whether they'd like TuneUp to create playlists of all the albums they've cleaned.
The Tuniverse tab gives you a nice overview of currently playing music along with online videos, news, and more.
(Credit: CNET)The downloadable trial will let you sample some of the program's features including 100 free track cleanups and 50 cover art matches, along with the Tuniverse information and upcoming concerts. The pricing for the full version of the program is a bit strange. You get unlimited use of the product for $19.95 a year, or you can pay $29.95 for a lifetime membership. Sounds to me like any sane person would pay $29.95, but that's probably what they're banking on. Either way, if you have a big or growing music library, TuneUp Companion is a great way to get all your music properly labeled. The additional easily accessible online news and videos as well as concert information are icing on the cake.
This low-cost graphics app makes creating Web buttons, banners, and stylized text easy. With tons of premade templates and samples to get you started, Art Text lets you spend your time fine-tuning your work instead of starting from scratch. When you're done, you can export your work in several formats, letting you put the final touches on your design in your favorite graphics or image-editing program.
Still not convinced? Then check out this First Look video of Art Text for Mac to get a quick overview.
TuneUp Companion has been getting a lot of attention for their iTunes plug-in for Windows, and now they're trying to drum up interest in the Mac version.
Basically, the plug-in powers up cover art discovery while cleaning up metatags, automatically discovering contextually-related Web content, and sniffs out upcoming concert information. I haven't yet had a chance to check out the Mac version yet, but keep in mind that it's a beta and there is likely some serious debugging needed.
In fact, the bugs aren't likely--they definitely exist. In the words TuneUp's media relations guru Andrew Kippen, the core features work but, "there will be bugs." That may not matter so much if you're the kind of person who likes to get in on the ground floor--TuneUp Media has given Download.com 100 invites to check out the Mac beta.
Send an email to download@tuneupmedia.com with your name as the only thing on the first line in the body of your message, and let us know in the comments here what you think of it.
UPDATED: Trial not limited to 30 days, clarified YouTube video embedding.
I'm not a big fan of iTunes for Windows. Even though I have an iPod, I haven't used its software sibling in nine months. (That'd be enough time for Apple to gestate a better version, you'd think.) However, iTunes addicts who just can't break away might want to take a look at TuneUp Companion, a neat little plug-in recently out of beta. It does a much better job of album art downloading, track tag repair and discovery, and tracking down concerts by your favorite bands.
In terms of user interface, TuneUp Companion is a bit awkward.
(Credit: CNET Networks)First thing to note with the program is that it installs as a sidebar on iTunes. If you're using the mothership in full-screen mode, or near enough to it, you're going to have to pull in the right edge of your jukebox before you can see what's going on. From there, TuneUp lets you register from within the add-on's sidebar.
The registration is boilerplate for Web sites these days. You don't have to contribute a credit card number, though, and that makes this an interesting replacement for the iTunes store. The new Genius bar is basically a repackaging of the old Apple hard-sell for the iTunes Store, whereas TuneUp Companion offers links to DRM-free Amazon under the now playing tab.
The program can clean song tags and discover new tracks, among other things.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Links in TuneUp include more than music purchasing, though. There's also a YouTube discovery feature, automatically pulling in links to related YouTube videos. Click on the link and video opens within TuneUp, which isn't quite as smooth as embedding the video directly--but it does save on space. Concert notifications are courtesy of StubHub, news comes from Google, and there's a bunch of eBay links, as well. These can be swapped around or minimized, but not completely hidden.
Other features include Clean, which fixes track metatag data that has been improperly maintained. This feature has been buggy in the past, although I didn't experience any crashes when testing it this time around. It doesn't come close to MediaMonkey's or Winamp's built-in tag repair, but it will make sure that your "RaDIOhed" tunes are spelled correctly and capitalized in the right spots. The album art locater worked well, having no problems with either popular or obscure albums.
Despite being fairly responsive, the plug-in's interface feels cramped and hectic, although that might be because it sits next to Apple's famously austere iTunes design. TuneUp Companion makes a good choice for people who want more out of iTunes, and it costs $20. The program limits you to 500 songs repairs and 50 album art downloads.
I use iTunes on both my Mac and Windows machines here at work. On my Windows box, it's not quite as smooth and takes up a few too many resources, but I still run it to listen to music from other users on my network. On my Mac, it couldn't be better, but I've found that the biggest problem I have with iTunes is not with the program itself.
In fact, even though it's mostly my fault, my music library is what gives me the most trouble. Like most people, I've gotten my music from a number of different sources so a lot of music is tagged incorrectly. My cover art is almost nonexistent so I can forget about using Apple's fancy Cover Flow feature. Some songs I accidentally added more than once, while others are from mix CDs where a song might read "Track 8" so I don't even know what it is until I listen. Certainly, I could spend a day going through each track, switch the tags, and grab the cover art, but who wants to spend all day Saturday sifting through their music library? Not me.
All of TuneUp Companion's tools show up to the right of your iTunes interface.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Fortunately, someone has developed an app to fix this situation, though it is not yet perfect. TuneUp Companion from TuneUp Media is an iTunes plug-in that helps you analyze and clean up a messy library in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually. The TuneUp Companion interface shows up to the right of your iTunes music library with features for cleaning up tags, finding album artwork, getting more info about artists, and genre-related music recommendations. You can also search concert listings in your area for bands in your library.
Get a list of likely matches before you save to your library.
(Credit: CNET Networks)But does it work? Obviously, the feature that really caught my attention was the Clean tool. It takes an audio fingerprint of a mislabeled song, matches it against Gracenote's Global Media Database of more than 90 million songs, and returns most likely matches, which you can save to your library. It even recognizes songs from the same album so you can get both music and cover art in one fell swoop. In my testing, it worked almost flawlessly as long as I only chose groups of 50 songs at a time, but simply selecting my library and trying to clean it all at once seemed to bring the program to a crawl. I have to admit, even if it's just a batch of songs at a time, TuneUp Companion made organizing my library a whole lot easier than tagging each song individually, but ideally it would be a one-shot operation.
TuneUp Companion's other tools worked great. The Cover Art tool quickly scanned my library and offered covers for every artist it recognized (my library has everything from regular songs to sound effects to music my friends make, so it would have no chance to recognize it all). The Now Playing section offered up music videos for the artist playing, a link to StubHub concert tickets, and similar artist recommendations from Amazon, all accessible with a click of a button. The Concerts section let me know where I could see acts locally for all the music in my library.
Find concerts for your favorite bands under the concerts tab.
(Credit: CNET Networks)TuneUp Companion isn't perfect, but it's definitely a great start. The development team assured me updates were on the way to iron out the few bugs remaining and a Mac client is due in the fall (for now TuneUp Companion is Windows only). The trial version listed here at Download.com offers 500 "cleans" and 50 cover art "finds"--not nearly enough for most libraries. An unlimited version of TuneUp Companion costs $19.95 for a one-time charge or you can get an annual subscription for $11.95.
Overall, I think that though TuneUp Companion was limited by how many songs it could clean at once, it did a great job of properly tagging my music library. If you try it out, be warned it will take some time processing groups of songs from bigger libraries, but with what I've seen so far, this is a giant leap for iTunes users who have been looking for a way to fix their listings (almost) automatically.
When Cover Flow for iTunes was first introduced, I was initially pretty excited. After all, who wouldn't want to browse through their music and movies by flipping through covers? It's almost like flipping through records or CDs at a music store. But once I got Cover Flow up on screen with iTunes, I was faced with something I'm sure a lot of people experienced--there were so few album covers associated with my music library, Cover Flow was almost useless. I've been able to add many covers to my library since, but I still had gaping sections where no cover art would show up at all.
Perform multiple searches simultaneously to fill in the blanks of your album art quickly.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Well, I have good news: there's a program available which will search several online databases to track down cover art for you, and does many more cool things to bring back that CD-flipping feeling of old to Cover Flow. It's called CoverScout, and though you will have to pay to register after a trial period, it really goes the extra mile to fill in the blanks of your music library. Like other programs of this type, it searches the Amazon.com database for matches, but CoverScout searches Google images too and can perform multiple searches simultaneously. It can also seek out art for singles and compilations with its advanced search system, so you're not limited to just the main stream albums. What's more, even if CoverScout can't find what you're looking for, you can use it to snap a picture of your CD cover with your Webcam or iSight camera to fill the art in manually. CoverScout supports iTunes, the iPhone, iPod Touch, and even the Apple TV.
Choose from multiple search results to find the exact cover you're looking for.
(Credit: CNET Networks)If you're like me, you probably thought Cover Flow was great until you actually saw how few albums were represented from your library. With CoverScout, you can breath new life into your iTunes music library and flip through your albums the way Cover Flow was meant to be used.
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Drawing has never been my strength. I love looking at art and can certainly appreciate an artist's skill and patience with creating something pleasing to the eye. But when it comes to putting a pen or brush to paper, I simply don't have the talent. I always admired my friends who had the gift of being able to draw, but it was a gift I never received. I'm sure there are many of us who have thought it would be nice to be able to draw at one time or another.
Fortunately artists (or maybe even just people who appreciate art) got together with talented software developers to make programs that help the less-talented create some decent-looking stuff. Obviously, there's no program that will turn you into the next Picasso, but with creatively made tools and brushes, you'll find you can create some very nice work. I probably won't quit my day job, but when I'm feeling the creative urge, it's nice to know there are programs designed to make art more accessible to the rest of us.
There are a number of programs that give you the tools to draw on your computer, but in this Killer Download, I've put together a group of apps that offer unique tools and methods for creating something with a bit more than just lines and shapes.
Choose from a huge list of brushes and effects for your project.
(Credit: CNET Networks)SmoothDraw is the most straightforward drawing tool of this group, but offers some unique brushes and features to enhance your work. You can use pens, pencils, air brushes, spray cans, water colors, and many other tools to get your preferred effect. To add more to your work, you can choose from a nice list of simple filters and effects. You also can experiment with layers and change several variables of each brush to get a different look. Though this one is the most straightforward, it doesn't offer the truly unique toolsets of the programs below, but as a paint program with some extra options, it's a good choice ($45).
The strengths of this app are the unobtrusive interface design and realistic brush strokes.
(Credit: CNET Networks)ArtRage makes your whole desktop the canvas, with an interesting and well-thought-out interface designed to stay out of your way. You get to choose from tools such as paint brushes, pencils, felt pens, and crayons, and each looks much like its real-world counterpart. The best thing about this program is the attention paid to your work with regard to the interface. As you get over near an edge, interface elements will automatically disappear to stay out of your way. Also, right-clicking removes all tool bars so it's just you and the canvas. There are a number of cool-looking tools you can unlock if you register ($25), but the included brushes and pens are fun to work with too.
This app lets you experiment with several variables to create the perfect kaleidoscopic design.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Mandala Painter was designed to help you create kaleidoscopic Mandala designs, but is loaded with options and features for simple drawing as well. The kaleidoscope effects are excellent, with tools for creating extremely simple designs or incredibly complex multidivision Mandalas (think: more mirrors in the kaleidoscope). You can also play around with filters for different effects and add layers to your project to get it just the way you like it. One feature that is truly unique (in a funny way) is the ability to play new age music from within the interface. If the jazzy flute and guitars don't get you in the creative mood, I'm not sure what will. A demo version watermark will stay on your work until you register ($29).
Not everyone was lucky enough to be born with the ability to draw or paint. With one of these unique paint programs on your hard drive, maybe you can fulfill your creative urges and produce something nice to look at in the process.
Corel Painter Essentials 4, available for both Windows and Mac, combines the resources of a Photoshop with the carte blanche of a art studio program, but without the attitude of either. The end result is something that's more appropriate for people looking to either paint or artistically tweak their photos and to have fun doing it.
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