Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 10.1

Bottom line: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 isn't perfect, but it's the best dictation software available. We don't find this upgrade necessary for the most basic dictation, although new features may benefit heavily accented English speakers and those who rely heavily on voice commands.

Who wants to risk or aggravate carpal tunnel syndrome at a keyboard? People who suffer repetitive stress injuries, type slowly, or dictate long documents for work are among the best candidates for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, which types as you talk. While not perfect, it's the best consumer tool available for digital dictation and can save time and headaches for the right user.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking's maker, Nuance, estimates that built-in speech-to-text capabilities in Windows Vista are about five years behind those of this application. You could get by with such features in Windows for occasional use, but Dragon is deeper and more accurate.

Version 10 is supposed to be 20 percent more accurate than its predecessor, both which supposedly offer greater than 99 percent accuracy. However, that won't likely translate to your personal experience. We found success with about four out of five spoken words. Should we blame our lisping, soft-spoken ways, the software, or the hardware?

The updates to Dragon 10 include support for people with accented English, as well as voice-command shortcuts for supported applications and Web searches. Dragon NaturallySpeaking is supposed to translate spoken words to text twice as quickly as version 9. We couldn't measure that, but did notice a speed improvement.

Setup and interface
Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 runs only on Windows XP or 2000 SP4 or higher or on Vista, so Mac users are out of luck. (ViaVoice for the Mac, which uses Nuance's technology, is no longer updated.) It requires 512MB of RAM and 1GB of free hard-drive space. You'll also need a noise-canceling headset microphone, a 16-bit or equivalent sound card, and a DVD drive.

If you only need a tool to type as you talk and don't want to dictate commands to software or for Web searches, then opt for the $99 Standard edition of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Preferred, for $199, includes software voice commands as well as support for mobile devices. Preferred Mobile adds a digital voice recorder.

We tested the $899 Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 10, which adds support for forms, networking capabilities for an office, and the choice of a standard or Bluetooth headset. We wish a USB headset were an option; you'll have to buy a dongle to hook up the mic-in headset to a USB slot. The $1,199 Legal edition also helps you dictate briefs and court documents.

Make sure to uninstall an earlier version of Dragon if you have one. And if you already have the latest version on a PC, don't overwrite it with a lesser-featured version that may be bundled with a new, supported digital voice recorder.

Installing Dragon 10 on two Windows XP machines took around 20 minutes without incident. Unfortunately, Windows Vista installation was a nightmare. It took more than 10 minutes to install Visual C++ 8.0 Runtime, only to find out it hadn't fully installed. Or had it? We were caught in a catch-22 of circular commands after rebooting more than a dozen times. The issue was related to a known bug in Windows Vista. We spent what amounted to more than two hours with a polite, bright tech support representative who offered a workaround.

Once it's running, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 adds a small feature bar that sits atop other open applications on your desktop. The well-organized pull-down menus haven't changed from the past. The text will "type" pretty much wherever a cursor appears, including word processing pages, Web form fields, and the included DragonPad.

Dragon performs a microphone check during setup. When our volume was too low on the Windows Vista laptop, we couldn't use the software. Somehow reading our frustrated mind, it typed "I hate you I" when we said, "Type. Type!" Saying "crazy" got spelled out as "greasy." Then "greasy," spoken, translated to "leafy," then "greens fee," then "Greenstein." In fact, the included headset didn't deliver adequate voice quality to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking at all. We reverted to the same headset packaged with Dragon 9, with better results.

Training is optional, but we recommend stepping through its paces to get Dragon up to speed with your speech patterns. The software can also scan the documents and e-mails on your computer to look for commonly used words.

Features
New to this update is support for accents which include, oddly enough, Teen English alongside American, Australian, Southern Asian, British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish accents. And there's improved QuickVoice formatting. For instance, now you can utter the command, "Underline The Grapes of Wrath" to underline the book's title, which took two steps with previous versions.

In addition, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 introduces Voice Shortcuts that enable you to look things up online quickly in your default browser. Tell Dragon to "search YouTube for Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream Speech,'" and relevant results appear on YouTube. The same applies for Wikipedia, eBay, and Amazon. Dragon 10 is also built to search within Windows Vista folders and in Google Desktop.

This application supports commands in Microsoft Word, Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, and AOL. Using Dragon with the Google Docs online word processor was trickier in our tests than with Microsoft Word 2003 or 2007. People with disabilities can mostly drop the mouse and the keyboard, asking Dragon to do the work for them. But if you have the choice, we still prefer manual controls to the tedious attempts at using Dragon to cut and paste chunks of text within a long document.

The more you use Dragon, correcting its errors and adding your own lingo to its vocabulary, the better it gets. It already recognizes everything from "a cappella" to "smiley-face" to "ZZ Top." Abbreviations and tech slang work, too; speaking "dot ASP" spells ".ASP" and saying "smiley-face" will spell out this character: :-) Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 has the intelligence to detect words within context. For example, it knows to type "eating a carrot" instead of "eating a karat."

You don't need to speak like a robot into the mic, although enunciating helps. If you tend to mumble, then act as if you're reading a book to a child or a teleprompter for a newscast when using Dragon. Out of the box, the application does very well with long, polysyllabic words. But we've found it difficult for Dragon versions 8, 9, and 10 to distinguish between short words with similar vowel sounds, such as "a," "the," and "of."

You can plug in a variety of voice recorders for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 to transcribe your own voice. The application supports MP3, WAV, and WMA audio files. You can create a profile of your voice for a mobile recording device, such as a Pocket PC handheld. After you record your thoughts on the go, you can feed Dragon that sound file later for transcription.

Unfortunately, the Dragon 10 license is only good for one user. To the woe of journalists and college students, Dragon won't transcribe your recording of, say, an interview subject or a college professor.

Service and support
Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 includes free telephone or online chat support for one installation incident, without which we wouldn't have been able to run Windows Vista installation. Step-by-step setup help and tutorials are excellent. We found the searchable online knowledgebase to be well organized. Peer support is also available online.

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Adobe Photoshop Extended CS5

Two years ago, Adobe Systems thought the only big change coming with Photoshop CS5 would be the complete overhaul needed to build a 64-bit Mac version. With the unveiling of the software Monday, though, it's clear Adobe far exceeded that low expectation.

Photoshop CS5 brings a number of high-profile features for photographers, artists, and the broader designer market that uses the software. It's just one of numerous changes among the Creative Suite 5 packages Adobe is unveiling at a Monday event, but it's one of Adobe's highest-profile programs. So without further ado, here's what's coming when the new version ships in the next 30 days:

• Automatic lens corrections, based on Adobe's close measurements of various camera bodies and lenses, can ease the removal of barrel and pincushion distortion, vignetting that darkens corners, and chromatic aberration that produces colored fringes along edges. This automates a previously manual chore. People can create their own basic profiles and, showing the wonders of crowdsourcing, share them on the Net.

• Revamped support for high-dynamic range (HDR) photography will let people combine a range of images at different exposures--and this time, produce the desired look out of the composite. Adobe believes it's surpassed the prevailing tool for the job, HDRsoft's Photomatix. Photoshop CS5's HDR Pro feature can be used for an unassuming look that fixes blown-out highlights and crushed blacks, or it can be used to generate the eerie but controversial otherworldly look some HDR aficionados enjoy. For those who want the effect but didn't take bracketed photos at different exposures, a HDR toning command applies the look to a single image.

• Content-aware fill lets a person delete a region of a photo--an unwanted object, for example--and let Photoshop fill in the resulting blank patch even if it's a complicated background. Content-aware fill can also flesh out the blank patches left around the edges when images are stitched into a panorama. It's common knowledge that photo-editing tools can be used to alter reality, but this automates the process even more.

• An advanced selection tool will let people more easily isolate subjects from their backgrounds, even with that most notorious of complicated edges, hair. Photoshop users spend lots of tedious hours at this, often buying plug-ins to help, so any improvement in automation is significant.

• Puppet warp lets people move elements of a scene around with free-form adjustments based on control points and anchor points. Adobe demonstrated it moving an elephant's trunk from the ground to its mouth, and to level a horizon line bowed by lens distortion, but a more likely use case is making models look skinny and curvaceous.

• 64-bit support on Mac OS X. It was there on Windows since Photoshop CS4 was released in September 2008, but now Mac users will get its chief benefit, the ability to handle really large images and exploit the advantages of computers with more than 4GB of memory.

• The artistic set gets new physics-based paintbrush and paint dynamics, including attributes such as ink flow, detailed brush shape, and paint mixing. This process is accelerated by a computer's graphics processing unit, or GPU, and works in conjunction with the pressure and orientation settings of a pen and tablet setup such as those from Wacom.

• The plug-in for handling raw images from higher-end cameras--inconvenient but powerful files taken from the image sensor without in-camera processing into a JPEG--is refurbished with the new, higher-quality processing algorithms for noise reduction and edge sharpening that Adobe is building into the upcoming Lightroom 3.

There's more, of course, many of them lacking the glamour of the above. Bryan O'Neil Hughes, Photoshop product manager, said there were more than 36 changes made to address the "just do it" list of productivity improvements Adobe asked users to supply.

Providing significant new features an important consideration given the unceasing grumbling Adobe faces about its upgrade prices. Adobe hasn't announced pricing, but in the past upgrades have cost hundreds of dollars. The software should be available within 30 days, Adobe said.

It remains to be seen whether Photoshop customers will eagerly embrace the new features. Another constant refrain is grumbling about Photoshop bloat from those who see a faster, svelte version as the most desirable upgrade. The trouble, as Adobe has pointed out, is that nobody can agree on what limbs should be lopped from the Photoshop feature tree.

However, to tidy things up somewhat, Photoshop CS5 gets a series of buttons toward the upper right that tailor the user interface to various common tasks.

Adobe does continue to keep some features out of the regular Photoshop, offering a more expensive premium "Extended" version. With CS5, the flagship feature is Repousse, a module that lets 2D shapes be extruded and otherwise formed into 3D shapes.

Photoshop is 20 years old, and it's now got many stablemates that will be updated Monday. Once upon a time, there was a giant software industry devoted to selling boxes full of a CD-ROM and a manual. While much of the innovation has shifted to Web services, Adobe continues to pursue the old agenda.

It can, of course, because its products usually handle the kinds of CPU-hammering chores that adapt poorly so far to running over an Internet connection. It's built that into a big business--Ticonderoga Securities analyst Jay Vleeschhouwer estimates it generates about $235 million to $240 million a year right now for Adobe.

What else is in the Creative Suite? There's Premiere Pro for video editing, After Effects for video effects, Illustrator for vector graphics, InDesign for page layout design, DreamWeaver for Web site creation, Flash Pro for writing Flash applications, the new Flash Catalyst for converting graphical mockups into Flash apps, Acrobat for handling PDF files, and others. It's a sprawling collection that spans multiple DVDs. Adobe packages it in any number of specific subsets for various specialties.

Many of these packages get new features, too. Illustrator has new abilities to incorporate perspective into 3D designs. Premiere Pro gets the new GPU- and multicore-accelerated playback engine called Mercury for higher-performance video, including better multilayer compositing. After Effects gets the roto brush for isolating backgrounds or elements across a series of frames, and both video tools are 64-bit to take advantage of lots of memory. And alas for Adobe, Flash Pro's fancy new feature, the ability to bring Flash software for the iPhone, appears to be in jeopardy with new Apple license terms.

One big difference at Adobe is the acquisition of Omniture, whose technology lets Web sites track usage in detail. Adobe thinks of it as part of a feedback loop to steer designers more intelligently, but it has another important element: it's a subscription service, not a shrink-wrapped box. Integration with Web-oriented tools such as Flash Pro and Dreamweaver appears to just be under way, though.

The full suite is so broad that Adobe has a tough time coming up with a theme to encompass all the changes. But that's not too important, as long as it can keep persuading its wide customer base to keep on paying for those boxes.

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Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended

Bottom line: This update should be worthwhile for security-minded businesses and creative firms. With Acrobat 9, Adobe brings new Web relevance to print-ready PDFs by enabling embedded video and animation. Forms, security, and overall ease of use are also enhanced.

The introduction of Adobe Acrobat 9 document-creation software could do for PDFs what the "Jazz Singer" did for movies. For the first time, PDFs can "talk" via embedded Flash video and Shockwave animation. In turn, users of Version 9 of the nearly ubiquitous and free Acrobat Reader will be able to watch movies, play interactive games, and run applications baked into PDFs without opening a third-party media player.

Among the many new, dynamic features to justify a business purchase of Acrobat 9 include dynamic maps, enhanced 256-bit encryption, and improved forms. On top of it all, Adobe offers an online community at Acrobat.com that facilitates online collaboration so users can store documents and literally work on the same page at the same time.

There are three versions of Acrobat 9: Standard at $299 or $99 to upgrade, Pro for $449 or $159 to upgrade, and Pro Extended for $699 or $229 to upgrade. Pro Extended also comes with Adobe Presenter, which plugs into Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 for adding interactivity to presentations. This review covers the costliest application, Acrobat 9 Pro Extended. However, unless otherwise noted, the features mentioned here can be found in Standard or Pro editions.

Acrobat 9 requires at least a 1.3GHz processor running Windows Vista or XP with Service Pack 2, with 256MB of RAM, screen resolution of 1,024x768 pixels, and 2.13GB of free hard-drive space at minimum. Adobe requires 512MB of RAM for Pro Extended and recommends video hardware acceleration.

Setup and interface
Installing Acrobat 9 Pro Extended took about 20 minutes on our Windows XP test computer. In our experience, uninstalling older versions of Acrobat took longer than adding the new application. The process was relatively smooth and unintrusive, although we did wind up with an Acrobat 9 icon on our desktop. During installation, Adobe offers the choice of opting into or rejecting its Product Improvement Program, which will send the company anonymous information about how you use the software. Although the company pledges anonymity, we were nevertheless glad that it presented the option not to participate upfront.

Features
This release of Acrobat makes PDFs more dynamic and packs in more new features than prior releases did. Although PDFs have been interactive for some time, such as with Version 8's support for Web-based forms, Acrobat 9 takes the print-ready document format into the so-called Web 2.0 era.

The Portable Document format is maturing from print-readiness to a venue for multimedia content. For the first time, PDFs will play movies via the free Acrobat Reader 9, set for a July release. Acrobat Pro Extended users can convert eight formats, including MOV and WMV files, to Flash content that can be embedded within PDFs alongside audio content and even 3D models. And developers can tweak layouts with Flex Builder 3 or Flash CS3.

Integrating with Acrobat 9 is Adobe Systems' beta release of the online community, Acrobat.com. It includes the Buzzword word processor with collaborative editing and commenting features as well as 5GB of file storage. Conversion of five documents to Portable Document Format, sadly, doesn't include those neat capabilities for embedding movies. But Acrobat.com's solid ConnectNow Web-conferencing and desktop-sharing tool enables chatting via text, video, and voice. The site also can host data from forms created in Acrobat software. Business users could opt to access documents at Acrobat online or handle collaboration via SharePoint workspaces, network folders, or WebDAV.

The new PDF Portfolios feature in Acrobat 9 lets users drag and drop content into a PDF bundle. Myriad layout and presentation options include a flip-through view similar to Apple's Cover Flow for the iPhone. Adobe also tried to make it easier for companies using Pro and Pro Extended to make pages match visually with themes and custom logos, and it improved tools for comparing documents. We created PDF Portfolios without a snag in some experiments. Unfortunately, in a couple of cases Acrobat wouldn't let us add some Flash movies, and it didn't offer a solid explanation.

Acrobat 9 also will take snapshots of Web pages and convert entire pages or chunks of them to a PDF that preserves links and animation. We were able to use this in Internet Explorer, but the command described by Adobe seemed to be missing from Firefox 2 or 3.

Mapping features only in Acrobat Pro Extended 9 preserve geospatial coordinates and enable users to mark locations and measure distances. In addition, architects and other designers using CAD software can embed 3D models within PDFs. These creative options are cool for professionals, but we wish you didn't need to pay $699 to use them. At least you can view the dynamic content, once Pro Extended users drop it into a PDF, within Acrobat Reader 9.

For creating online forms, Acrobat 9 adds intelligence to recognize content for conversion to fillable fields. Potentially delighting conference planners, a forms-tracking dashboard will show, for example, the status of responses to a mass party invitation e-mail and let a user send reminders to guests. Responses can be sorted, filtered, and exported to spreadsheets.

Acrobat 9's security enhancements enable users to add 256-bit encryption, which online banks use, for PDFs. Locking down PDFs can't get much more thorough, given the digital signatures and metadata removal also available. New comparison features, not in Acrobat Standard, highlight the edits between versions of a document. Redaction tools in the Pro editions, a key selling point of Acrobat 8, will offer searches for numeric patterns in addition to multiple words and phrases. A company could, for example, find every accidental mention of a Social Security number or top-secret product being developed and black out the potential leaks from a PDF with one blow.

Service and support
Adobe's Web site support pages include Flash tutorials, user forums, FAQs, and a searchable knowledge base. These resources are well-organized and thorough. However, Adobe's four support plans, from Bronze to Platinum, are costly. Installation help by phone is available only via a toll telephone number, for instance. You'll need to sign in to get customized help online.

Verdict
As with Acrobat 8.1, Adobe Acrobat 9 offers myriad features that the average consumer seeking to create a basic, print-ready PDF won't need. However, we find this update of Acrobat to be the most important in recent years for business users as well as interactive designers. The metadata removal, 256-bit encryption, and ease of redactions alone easily could justify the purchase for, say, a law firm. Those who specialize in making presentations with moving images and sounds will find plenty of options at their fingertips, especially given the integration with Adobe Creative Suite 3.3.

Adobe has laid the groundwork for rich PDF documents, although some of the coolest tools come at a premium. Could Acrobat Reader 9's support for Flash turn PDFs into a one-size-fits-all multimedia delivery venue? In the near future at least, we suspect that interactive PDFs won't necessarily sweep the Web. That's because only users of the paid software can make those singing, dancing documents, and only the Pro flavors convert multiple video formats to Flash. Although Acrobat.com has many free features, its PDF maker won't fold in video and animation. The application's cost may be a barrier for some emerging digital artists who might otherwise tinker with the dynamic tools.

Publisher's description

From Adobe Systems :

Easily convert any document that prints to PDF to preserve formatting and ensure document integrity. Convert to PDF with one-button ease from Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Project, Visio, Access, and Publisher, as well as Autodesk, AutoCAD, and Lotus Notes. Scan paper documents to PDF and automatically recognize text with optical character recognition (OCR) technology to create compact, searchable PDF documents. Archive e-mail or e-mail folders from Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes in PDF to facilitate search and retrieval.

Convert complete web pages, or just the portions you want, including or excluding rich and interactive media. PDF versions of web pages are easy to print, archive, mark up, and share.Convert virtually any 2D and 3D designs including layers, dimensions, and metadata to a single PDF file to share product data more easily and securely.

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Why it's time to move away from McAfee

Last week, McAfee pushed out a virus definition file update the company now admits did not meet an acceptable level of quality assurance. Users found this out the hard way when the update crippled their computers. While the damage to individual computer systems has been repairable, I recommend that you look elsewhere for your computer's security.

Screen snapshot of CNET News editor's computer in Portland after McAfee was causing her computer to reboot.

(Credit: CNET)

My recommendation comes down to a harsh reality: corporations should be accountable for their actions, and users have choices. In the security realm, there are at least a dozen top-shelf paid and free security suites. Choose any one of them: you're not beholden to a company that will risk your data, time, and money--even accidentally.

Severe problems caused by buggy or false positive security updates are rare, but not unheard of, in the wide world of security software. Recent instances include an update from BitDefender that wreaked havoc on 64-bit Windows 7 computers last month, an Avast update that marked hundreds of legitimate files as threats in December 2009, one from Computer Associates that flagged a Windows system file as a virus in July 2009, a case of attacking the competition when freeware security giant AVG marked ZoneAlarm as malware in October 2008, and McAfee itself pushed program executables for Microsoft Excel and Adobe's update manager into quarantine in March 2006. So why is McAfee's latest error egregious enough to merit a switch?

For one thing, McAfee's faulty virus definition file flagged the Windows system-critical file SVCHOST.EXE as a threat and quarantined it. Among other problems, this had the effect of forcing the computer to shut down every 60 seconds, and preventing USB drives from connecting to the computer. For many users, replacement versions of SVCHOST.EXE had to be copied to CD before they could be used. The original fix was labor-intensive and complicated by the fact that the bad update prevented many affected people from accessing the Internet in the first place. McAfee finally announced a simple tool to apply the fix on Thursday night, but it still requires a second computer to download it, and it cannot be applied remotely.

Second, McAfee wasn't forthcoming with answers, and even initially downplayed the fact that hospitals, police departments, and supermarket chains were affected along with individual consumers. In disastrous situations like this, it's important to communicate clearly with your customers, which McAfee didn't. Not only did Barry McPherson, executive vice president of support and customer service, not publish a blog addressing the problemuntil mid-afternoon Wednesday, but IT professionals also felt McAfee's attempts to help them were less than professional.

Computer support specialist for the College of Business at Illinois State University Pete Juvinall was directly involved with fixing around 40 computers crippled by the update. He told me that the fix that McAfee originally published "didn't really quite work as intended." He added, "it really surprised me that it was two or three hours before 5959 surfaced." Knowledge Base article 5959 was the first source from McAfee to fix the problem.

Another computer support specialist, Charles Winston at the University of Washington, only had to fix three computers but said that he had "never seen anything like it. It was unbelievable that something of this scale happened." The IT department at the University of Michigan Medical School, which was also affected, refused to talk to me because they were still fixing computers as of Monday morning.

Neither McPherson's original post nor a follow-up written at 11:14 p.m. on Wednesday and titled "A long day at McAfee" contained an apology; that didn't arrive until late on Thursday night. Angry comments in response to a post by McAfee President and CEO David DeWalt written on Friday take far greater issue with his tone and terminology than the incident itself.

To its credit, McAfee announced Monday a plan to reimburse home users and extend their antivirus subscriptions for two years free of charge. Details of the program are still developing, but that doesn't excuse the incredible spread of damage that the update caused in the first place, nor the tone-deaf handling of the situation.

I say all this in light of the fact that McAfee's consumer security suite has made some impressive improvements this year. However, more than any other third-party program, security vendors have unfettered access to your system. Combine the worst of bad updates with gross errors in communicating to their customers about how to fix a problem that they caused, and I feel that it is irresponsible to continue to recommend McAfee for now.

You can check out other free and paid security options at CNET Download.com's Security Center.

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