As a household name, Photoshop is in a peculiar position. Everyone knows that Photoshop is synonymous with photo retouching and manipulation, but practically no one besides designers and artists knows how to use it. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of amateur digital photographers who neither need nor want the complexity of the real thing. In the past, Adobe has targeted the home audience with Photoshop Elements and, more recently, Photoshop.com's online photo editor.
But there's a new group of casual photographers who don't even use a camera proper. The iPhone is now one of the most popular cameras on Flickr, ahead of SLRs and point-and-shoots alike. Photoshop.com Mobile is available for a wide array of smartphones, but the iPhone version is by far the most advanced. In addition to uploading photos to Photoshop.com, Adobe's photo gallery site, the iPhone Photoshop app provides several simple but useful photo editing tools. You can take a photo, retouch it and upload it for friends to see, all without touching a computer.
As with the now-defunct (update: alive and perfectly well, thank you) Photoshop Elements and the Photoshop.com web editor, Photoshop.com Mobile is not at all like its big brother; there are no layers, no vector features and no drawing tools. You can, however, tweak a photo's exposure, rotate and crop the image, tint the photo a specific colour, and even apply one of several built-in filters. You won't be doing any substantial touch-up work in Photoshop.com Mobile, but for most people there's more than enough here to punch up any personal snap.
The rest of the music industry has evolved in leaps and bounds ever since the creation of Napster, but music videos still serve the same basic purpose as they did a decade ago: as promotional clips intended to sell a record or an artist. The major difference now is that most people don't watch music videos on TV any more; they head to YouTube instead. As a result, has become one of the largest online repositories for music, even though it was never intended to serve the music industry or music fans.
TubeRadio brings some much-needed musical context to YouTube's massive library of videos by mixing in artist and album information from Last.fm and song lyrics from Lyricsfly.com, and then coating the whole thing in a glossy iTunes-esque coat of paint. You can build playlists of songs out of YouTube videos by searching for them directly via the basic search, or grab entire an entire album's worth of videos by using the Discography search to look for artists.
The service is still relatively new, meaning there are kinks to work out. The video display is quite a bit smaller than what you'd see on YouTube proper, and though you can toggle full-screen playback, it would be nice to have an in-between size. TubeRadio is also at the mercy of YouTube's library, which means often it won't find actual music videos, but live performances or even just audio with a static album cover. TubeRadio's already more attractive and easier to use than YouTube when it comes to music videos, though, and that counts for a lot.
Intended to become a standard for trading, viewing and printing documents of any type, the PDF file format created by Adobe has only been partially successful. Thanks to the success of the free Adobe Reader, installed on countless computers and web browsers worldwide, nearly everyone has the ability to view PDFs. Creating PDFs is a different matter, especially on Windows–unlike Macs, which have PDF creation built in, your options are more limited on Windows.
You could plunk down the cash necessary to buy Adobe Acrobat, but at $299 (U.S.) and up this isn't a viable solution for people who just want to turn a Word document into a PDF. In a straight feature-by-feature comparison, Acrobat soundly trounces Nitro's PrimoPDF–but then, PrimoPDF doesn't need to compete on features because it's free. For those of us who don't need or care about optical character recognition, PDF encryption or the ability to embed Flash, PrimoPDF does what it says on the tin: totally free PDF creation.
The only time you ever need to actually open PrimoPDF is to change its configuration. Otherwise, you create a PDF in much the same way you would on a Mac: print a document as you would to a normal printer, but select the PrimoPDF virtual printer instead. The utility can handle a wide variety of situations with aplomb–web pages and long Word documents with embedded images came out just fine, though it didn't quite get the colours right on an InDesign document. For simple, day-to-day PDF creation tasks, PrimoPDF gets the job done quickly and easily.
