I always liked people able to organize their workflow using an elaborated set of rules that are well defined and flexible at the same time. I also think that brainstorming with a clear purpose without proper management of the ideas is pointless, and since mind mapping and brainstorming computer software is not a tool that can be seen only in Star Trek, that's what I target today - a program from a company known as Computer Systems Odessa, called ConceptDraw MINDMAP Professional.


Setup

The current version of MINDMAP Professional is 5.1.0.0, and the full version of this application is priced as high as $199, but it seems its price is backed up by some serious features and built in content. Anyway, we'll talk about those just a bit later...

The setup package comes inside a ZIP archive that has 32MB in size, while the executable file is only 2MB larger. The application installed itself pretty fast, without asking me too many questions. As you can see in the screenshots above, there's nothing out of ordinary about the setup process, so let's move on to the interface, as usual.


Interface

While MINDMAP's interface may seem cluttered and not so easy to understand at first sight, you get a lot of guidance all along the way, so in the end you'll conclude that using this program is pretty easy to use. The interface is highly customizable, as you can edit every toolbar present in the main window, and the various panels can be hidden or closed as you wish. When you start the program for the first time, the Welcome Screen that can be noticed in the screenshot to the left gives you all the information you need to find yourself inside a brainstorming session or editing a mindmap in no time.


Features

ConceptDraw MINDMAP Professional is a software based on the Mind Mapping theory, and allows you to easily organize and exchange information by combining images and words. For example, let's take the brainstorming tool...

Go to the File menu, choose New, and then Brainstorming. In this screen, simply enter the theme of the session and add as many ideas as you can, or try to beat the clock in a timed brainstorming session, and keep only the ideas that emerged during the limited amount of time you have set. When you finish, simply click the button labeled Finish Brainstorming, and you're going to find yourself inside the main window. Here, you can easily define relations between the ideas, arrange the map with a single click and pick a visual theme for your mind map (this is done using the Format menu's Map Theme option).

Leaving aside the themes integrated into the program and the excellent brainstorming mode, there are still plenty of things to enjoy, like the integrated image libraries or the mind map templates.

The image library is organized into individual categories, without tagged and searcheable items. While some people may find this handy, I think it would be nice to have tags for each image and a search feature in the next versions. After all, it's always easier to type the name of an object inside a search box, rather than looking for it inside a group of untagged items.

Once you have organized your ideas and notes into a mind map, the result of your work can be saved into a lot of formats, such as PDF, PPT, RTF or PNG. Even better, you can send the files straight to a FTP server from within the program, and this is only the beginning...


The Good

ConceptDraw MINDMAP Professional is a useful program for those individuals with lots of ideas and problems organizing them and, of course, for teams of people that work to achieve a common goal. This program works like a charm, looks great is pretty easy to use, and the trial version doesn't have any other limitation than the 30 days period.

The Bad

I know that considering all that you get included in the program, and the additional resources available on the official website, $199 isn't really a lot, couldn't there be a special pricing option for home users?

Conclusion

Every program that can help me get my ideas ordered makes me go "Wow", especially when it really does its job, and this time I found quite a little treasure. There's nothing else to say, because the best thing to do is grab the trial version and give MINDMAP a try, then get back here and share your opinion with the rest of us, of course!

Developer: Computer Systems Odessa
Price: $199
Trial Link: Download

People passionate for software can now vote the most interesting stories on a new website launched by Intel, called CoolSW (Cool Software).



In this online community, members can read news about software companies and vote the “coolest” ones.
This way any visitor can read on the front page information about the most interesting software and software companies.

Similar to Digg, the website includes categories like Digital Home, Mobility, Enterprise and Healthcare.

According to Steve Santamaria, the director of Software and Solutions Group at Intel, in charge with finding independent software companies and helping them grow, the investments cost about $40,000 and the website is focused on business ideas, allowing comments and votes from the wider developer and entrepreneur community.

The internal website had 500,000 visitors and 1.4 million page views on 80,000 contributions.

In the near future, I'll have to reinstall my operating system, because I'll upgrade my computer. So far, so good, but it would be really nice to know that I can rely on a single tool for all those maintenance tasks I have to perform and I forget about them too often. Anyway, when my computer starts moving like a turtle on the highway, I suddenly remember to clean up all junk and fix my registry errors and today, I just got my hands on PC Health Optimizer, a maintenance and tweaking suite that I hardly wait to see what's capable of...

Setup

PC Health Optimizer is more than just a program, having more individual applications inside, so a size of 15MB for the kit of such a software suite shouldn't be considered too much. A problem that is worth being mentioned here is the download speed limitation of the official server to about 4-5KB/s (at least that's what I concluded to be the problem), which can be easily surpassed by using a download manager, such as IDM.
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The last version of the suite is 1.6.31, but the applications inside it have various own version numbers (for example, the About screen of the File Backup program shows "PC Health Optimizer ver 1.0"). The same thing happens with the trial period, which should be 15 days, but it was really unpleasant to notice that some tools that should have been here are not included at all in the trial version. Well, you can pay up $39.97 and find out how they behave, since the product is also covered by a 30 day money-back guarantee...












Installing the suite is a piece of cake, as you can see in the screenshots above, and since there should be enough to discuss regarding the interface and features of this software suite, let's move on and check'em out!

Interface

PC Health Optimizer has a very nice interface, with great graphics and easy to use, but... some of its tools don't match the looks of the parent application - as an example, look at the Doctor Spyware Cleaner, and you'll get the idea... Other than that, most programs from the suite that I was able to use in the trial version that I have are very easy to work with, since they use a wizard-style interaction with the user. Apart from some minor display issues in the main window of the parent application, everything looks good, so let's see what do we have next...

Features

The first thing to do once the program has started for the first time is to check your computer for problems, by pressing the text link Scan Now in the main window. When this process is complete, you're going to see some results, as you can see in the screenshot to the left (I hope your registry is cleaner than mine, anyway). By pressing on the issues (the text in red), the right application for fixing them is started, so it can't get easier than that!

While most optimization suites come with a lot of tools, but only a few have an antispyware tool, it was a really nice surprise to notice that PC Health Optimizer has an antispyware tool and an antivirus included. Unfortunately, the antivirus was not included in the trial package, but I can tell you that the antispyware tool offers real time protection against threats, so everything start to look like a really good deal...












The main window has 6 areas, each with links to various tools. These areas are the following - System Cleaner, System Optimizer, Privacy & Security, Administer & Control, File Utilities and, at last, Backup & Restore (backup and restore programs aren't file utilities, after all?). Since you can see what these are about in the screenshots above, I'll talk only about the most interesting things, leaving the rest for you to discover (and maybe come back here and share the info with us, especially about the tools not available in the trial).The most useful tools in the trial version of PC Health Optimizer, in my opinion, are the antispyware tool, the backup application and the registry cleaner. It would have been great for me to try the application called Doctor Kids Control from the suite, but all I got was a MoleBox launcher fatal error "DLL CORRUPTED", so... maybe next time!











While jumping between nag screens and "This application is not included in the trial version" windows, I also noticed that the SMARTDisk Checkup button, located in the Administer & Control area, doesn't have any visible effect. Well, you can't have all the features in the world for 38 bucks and everything to be perfect, and I really hope that the full version doesn't have these problems...

The Good

PC Health Optimizer has a lot of useful tools, including antivirus and antispyware protection, as well as a parental control tool. Considering what you get, the good price and money back guarantee look just great, especially since everyone shouldn't have any problems using the tools included in the package.

The Bad

The trial version is very limited, the interface has some minor problems and, although it may look a minor issue, the official site shows the wrong size of the setup package, 25MB instead of 14.

Conclusion

PC Health Optimizer is one of those many application suites that would do anything to get your money, but at least it has some features that help it stand out of the crowd. At first sight, I was really crazy about it, but after trying it out, I think that Retina-X Studios should release a much better trial version, because the one available at this time shows a lot but only does a little...

Developer: Retina-X Studios, LLC.
Price: $39.97
Trial Link: Download

It happened to me to need an exemplified image from some of my friends, to know at what stage they are, in order to help them setting programs like Revconnect, which is not easy to figure out how to do, if you are a beginner.
Unfortunately a few didn’t have that PrintScreen button on their keyboards.

This is an easy to use software which can replace that button.
FastStone Soft is a firm specialized in Media Processing Research and had developed FastStone Capture, a good utility for capturing anything on the screen, from windows to selected regions or scrolling web pages.
I said it is a good utility and I was referring at its flexibility and intuitive characteristics, which are the most important if the persons that will use it don’t know too much about screen capturing.

Its defining features include the small floating Capture Panel, easy to be dragged anywhere and minimized to the tray; global hotkeys for activating the capture capabilities when you need; very useful tools to capture windows, objects, full screen, rectangle/freehand-selected regions and scrolling areas; possibility to capture web pages in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera; an option for specifying the destination of captured images, such as internal editor, clipboard, file or printer; Text/Arrowed line/Highlight/Watermark annotation; add effects tools such as drop-shadow, torn-edge and fade-edge; add caption feature; possibility to resize, crop, zoom in/out; support for external editors; supported file types are BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, TGA and PDF; screen magnifier, color picker, and ruler; and multiple monitors support.

The latest version, 5.8, which has been released on October 5, comes with an enhanced “Save As” dialog, enlarged preview windows in rectangle capture mode and freehand capture mode, and several other improvements.
The software is available shareware for a 30-day trial period, but for those who want it now, the program is also available for buying at $19.95.

In the past, news groups and bulletin board systems were the best sources of information on the web, especially since the graphic user interfaces of that time were quite primitive. File transfers were usually done using the FTP protocol, and while the bulleting board systems as they were known in the 80s and the first half of the 90s are now almost extinct, FTP is still used on a large scale.

Moving into the present, I have to say it again: while the BitTorrent and verious new file transfer protocols are gaining ground, FTP remains a reliable way to transfer data, and so we arrive to the subject of this article, called simply FTP Now...


Setup

Currently, this program has reached version 2.6.73, and its trial version can be used for 30 days, without any limitations, apart from the nag screen that appears when you open or shut down the program. If you will consider purchasing this program, you should now from now that a single user license is priced at $29.95.

The setup package has only 1.7MB in size, and installing it is very easy, as you can see in the screenshots above.


Interface

FTP Now's interface is well organized, easy to use and fairly customizable. While you won't be able to choose an interface theme or edit the colors of various areas of the program, you can choose which panels to display and dock/detach toolbars and panels. The Connection Wizard makes using this program even easier, and if something still seems unclear, you can check the Help system to solve the problem. These being said, let's see what goodies we have hidden inside this average interface...


Features

The first thing you want to do after installing a FTP client is connecting to a remote server, of course, and when the program comes with a small yet useful set of built in connections, that's even better. Inside the Favorites menu, you can pick one of the exactly 18 FTP locations belonging to the following 4 categories - Game, Archive, Hardware and Software Sites. New categories and FTP sites can be easily added, directly from the Site Manager or by using the Connection Wizard.

The Connection Wizard is very easay to use, taking things very slow, step by step, but if you have a bit of experience with FTP clients, then you'll probably want to insert new sites quickly, right in the Site Manager.

The Site Manager opens when you click the Connect button from the toolbar or use the Ctrl+C keyboard shortcut, but this is not everything. You can also pick the item called Connect from the File menu or Organize Favorites (keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+E), from the Favorites menu, to achieve the same result.

Since the producer of this program claims one of the new features allows you to upload and download multiple files simultaneously, let me tell you what I had to go through, before moving on to the conclusions...

I connect to a server, select more files, and drag them to a folder on my drive. Nothing out of ordinary. The result? FTP Now starts to simultaneously download those files, but it also opens about two dozen transfer status windows, one for each file. Now, how's that? I think somebody that designed the user interface was playing Solitaire or Pinball during its work hours, I can't see any other logical reason for this major flaw to occur!


The Good

FTP Now is a very easy to use, fast and trustworthy FTP client software, with very low system requirements.

The Bad

Leaving the major interface flaw I mentioned above, I would like to see more FTP locations included in the Favorites menu, support for secure FTP transfers, scheduling and the ability to connect to multiple servers at once. At last, this program is too expensive for what can be done with it.

Conclusion

FTP Now claims to have the look and feel of Windows Explorer, and the unfortunate coincidence is that just like Microsoft's product, this program lacks a lot of features, and it doesn't look that great either. Well, it does its job the right way, and that's what really matters, in the end, so give it a try, if you have enough time for this.


Developer: Network-Client.com
Price: $29.95
Trial Link: Download