Featured Speakers

Two of the cooler iPod speaker systems now on the market couldn’t be any more different in size or price, but they have one thing in common: they aim at a specific target and hit it.

At one extreme is B&W’s awesome $600 Zeppelin audio system. At the other, SkullCandy’s “Pipe” portable speakers, which cost one-tenth as much.

Can you compare them? By no means. You need to look at each in the context of the specific purpose for which they are designed.

Bowers & Wilkins (B&W), the British maker of some of the world’s highest end speakers and a leading choice of recording engineers, clearly set out to create the ultimate iPod speaker dock. And they did it.



B&W is famous for the elegance of its sound. Crisp and clear, but never harsh. The ambience is of a warm concert hall or intimate club. Lots of detail and broad frequency response. The B&W sound is instrumental or vocal, not electronic.

Capturing that in a single-piece iPod dock took some doing. The 25-inch wide spheroid holds five drivers -- two tweeters (high notes), two mid-range (what it says), and one bass (lows). B&W used high-tech composites in the construction to control vibrations. A chrome arm extends from the device to hold the iPod dock, and the system integrates with the iPod’s controls so that you adjust tone and other speaker settings through your iPod.

The look is perhaps controversial (I thought it was highly stylish but my wife hated it), but there is nothing to dispute about the sound. Sheer excellence.

If there is a nit to pick, it’s that the matching spheroid remote control has only minimal functions and cannot navigate through the iPod’s menus, as the remotes of many more modest devices (include the Pipe) can. A B&W spokesperson says reason was to maintain a simplicity to the design. But with a unit this big, you are probably going to put it someplace a little out of the way. So a multi-function remote would be a good idea.

Now, why would you want to spend $600 for an iPod dock? You probably wouldn’t if that was you only intent. B&W effectively has admitted as much by introducing a $400 Zeppelin Mini, a more conventionally designed system that is priced closer to competing audiophile docks. The real value in the Zeppelin is that if you combine it with an iPod Classic loaded with music in lossless format, you wind up with a valid competitor to a traditional component audio system that would cost much more.

Think of it as a home stereo system redefined for the digital age.

If B&W is all about British elegance, SkullCandy is about skateboards, surf, rollerblades, and a slightly punk attitude. Its primary product line is headphones and earphones aimed at a young, active audience.

The Pipe is an 8-inch tube (essentially a smaller version of the cardboard roll inside a roll of paper towels) with speakers firing out of each end and an iPod docking port in the middle. The company’s skull logos are on the speaker grills, making it a dock with Attitude. I doubt that the audiophile market figured at all in the designers’ calculations.

Nevertheless for those who regularly take iPods and iPhone on the road, the Pipe has hit the sweet spot between size and sound that makes it one of the best “packable” iPod speaker systems I’ve used. Sound is good on a wide range of music -- it handles classical and jazz just as well as it does rock. It can crank up high volume and can also provide pleasing sound at lower don’t-antagonize-the-people-in-the-hotel-room-next-door levels.

The Pipe is available in black or chrome -- depending on what kind of style statement you want to make. It slips easily into a briefcase, backpack, or suitcase. A full-function remote is included as is an AC adapter. (Batteries are NOT included; four AAA cells are required.) There’s even an extra rubber leg included that attaches to the latch of the battery compartment to provide extra stability.

In their own ways, the Pipe and the Zeppelin prove that sometimes one size doesn’t fit all.
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Is it real or is it Photoshop?

Contemplating the metaphysics of reality probably wasn’t on the minds of Adobe’s product team that developed Photoshop Elements 8. But nevertheless, the new feature set raises some interesting questions about what is “real” when it comes to photography.

Ever since “photoshop” became a verb meaning digital photo enhancement, there has been a lingering question about what is a legitimate fix and what is dishonest manipulation. Back in the pre-digital days of chemical film, a skilled darkroom maven could do a lot to transmute mediocre shots into good ones by fixing exposure, contrast, and the like. But mainly with black-and-white film -- and certainly not to the extent possible with today’s digital technology.

News organizations frequently grapple with the issue. Generally the policy is that only limited adjustments are allowed. Anything more than that is considered to have been faked. The term of art “photo illustration” even was coined to describe more extensive manipulations, which are allowed in some circumstances. (An example would be a collage of people mentioned in an article, which was compiled from individual photos.)

Even so, controversies erupt all the time about alleged violations. So clearly even the pros are having issues with the issue.

Meantime, Adobe keeps on refining Photoshop and its consumer counterpart, Photoshop Elements.

The company has released its latest update, Elements 8 for Windows and Mac -- a source of cheer for Mac users as the two platforms now are at parity (there was no Elements 7 for the Mac). The street price is $75 for Windows; $83 for Mac. As in the past, I recommend that Windows users buy the $100 Photoshop Elements/Premiere Elements bundle as better buy. Premiere is a well-featured and user-friendly video editor that is a valuable tool on a PC. Adobe doesn’t make a Mac version of Premiere Elements because it would be redundant with the iMovie application that is standard on Macs.

One of the hot new features in Photoshop Elements -- the one that led to this musing on reality -- is the “Smart Brush.” It’s a tool that lets the user select a portion of a photo and make a specified modification to it. The options include making skies bluer, grass greener, and teeth whiter. Literally. There are also a few special effect such as sepia tones and black-and-white conversion. The later makes it absurdly easy for casual users to duplicate such fancy pro tricks as creating a photo with a mix of color and B&W sections.

I was working with a recent travel photo shot with a point-and-shoot digital camera of a seaside city taken from an adjacent hillside. A large percentage of the shot is sky or sea, which pose more lighting challenges than a typical point-and-shoot can handle. So I used the sky brush to darken the blue (and differentiate it from the sea), enhanced the green vegetation on the hill, and made the skyline come to life with the contrast adjustment.

The resulting photo was dazzling. But is it “real?” It certainly does not represent what the camera captured. On the other hand, the retouched version is closer to what my eyes saw on the scene.

Perhaps reality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Google Ups the Stakes in Computer-Phones

Verizon’s new Motorola Droid computer-phone is one of the best challengers yet to Apple’s iPhone. Which probably misses the point.

Mind you, Verizon, Motorola, and Google, which makes the Android operating system for the new device, have invested a lot in the comparison. An “iDon’t” ad campaign in print and online make the case that the Droid has capabilities that the iPhone lacks. There’s even a militant TV spot in which stealth warplanes bomb bystanders with Droid cellphones.

However, the really big aspect of Droid and Google’s 2.0 version of Android is that it gives birth to a new ecosystem for computer-phones.

(I use the term “computer-phone” to describe the class of devices that are small handheld computers married to cellphones. As David Pogue of The New York Times has noted, the old term “smartphone” isn’t really adequate to describe the latest technology.)

Android phones are married to Google’s online services. One of the first things you must do when you set one up, in fact, is either sign into an existing gmail account or create one. The phone links up its contacts and calendars to Google Contact and Google Calendars. While you can add support for other forms of email and corporate users can plug into Microsoft Exchange servers, Google is the only way for “civilians” to sync contacts and calendars. (One annoyance: calendar sync is limited to only the first Gmail account you set up, so if you have more than one account and calendar you are out of luck on syncing the rest.)

Uniquely among computer-phones, the Droid does not ship with desktop data transfer software. There’s no equivalent of iTunes, BlackBerry Desktop, Windows ActiveSync, or the like. To get photos and music on or off the Droid, you plug it into your computer with a USB cable, pull down a menu on the Droid’s touchscreen and “mount” the device on your computer. The Droid -- actually, its MicroSD memory card -- then shows up as a drive on your computer and you transfer files the same way you would with, say, a USB memory stick.

I recommend a free download of doubleTwist (doubletwist.com), available for both Mac and Windows to manage photos, music, and videos. It will simplify the transfer process and make it easier to create playlists.

But the essence of the Android concept is that your data lives on the “cloud” of Google’s services.

Google owes its explosive growth in part to its recognition that in the digital age data is more important than devices. It has expanded from its search and advertising core functions to attract more and more information into its servers. Contacts. Calendars. Documents. Photos. Video. And the list keeps growing. In return for hosting this information Google does two basic things for you: It gives you services for free that other companies charge large fees for. And it lets you access your data seamlessly on any platform you choose -- your own computer, the computer at an Internet cafe, or the Droid. Your data is available to you where you want it, when you want it. (Provided, of course, you have an Internet connection.)

As I wrote previously, I have reservations about “cloud computing” -- keeping data on the Internet. You entrust a great deal of personal data to Google. While I believe Google’s founders are sincere in their “don’t be evil” philosophy, it defies human nature to believe that the massive databases in Google’s possession will never be misused. That doesn’t mean you should avoid their services -- I use them. But you should think a little bit about how much privacy you are willing to give away.

Those caveats duly noted, my experience was that the Google ecosystem generally works well. Data synced promptly and efficiently between the Droid and Google. Someone who uses Google services as his or her principal data repository will be well satisfied. However, those of us who use desktop apps such as Microsoft Outlook on a PC or Microsoft Entourage on a Mac (or the built-in Mac and Windows equivalents) will find that the tools now available to sync that data with Google are somewhat clunky. You sync the desktop data to Google, which then syncs to the Droid. I doubt that will improve in the future as neither Microsoft nor Apple are highly motivated to enhance Google as a competitor.

On the all-important “is it as good as an iPhone?” question, the answer is: “of course, not.” The iPhone is smaller, lighter, and more sophisticated. It has extensive touch screen capabilities that the Droid lacks. For example, while the iPhone has its celebrated pinch-or-spread your fingers ability to blow up or shrink the data on display, Doid users have to use a system of tapping a zoom function. The iPhone is a better media player, a better game platform, and can host more apps.

The Doid, however, does have some advantages of its own. It’s very fast, thanks to its powerful processor. It has a more sensitive camera. It mutlitasks. It has voice dialing, voice searching, and voice-guided navigation. With its MicroSD card, it has expandable memory. And -- most important -- it has a swappable battery. The only thing that’s truly off is the slide-out keyboard, which hard to type on accurately yet lacks the auto-correction feature of the Droid’s onscreen virtual keyboard. Still, all-in-all it’s a nice device.

But let’s be frank here. None of this is going to be the key factor in whether someone buys a Droid or an iPhone. The real issue is Verizon vs. AT&T.

As Verizon’s “there a map for that” attack ads note, it offers high-speed “3G” access more widely than AT&T, which has the U.S. exclusive for the iPhone. In my experience, Verizon also has many fewer phone call drop outs than AT&T does. Joking about dropped calls is one of the rites of iPhone ownership. There’s also the issue of tethering -- using your phone as a modem for your laptop. A spokeswoman for Verizon promises that tethering will be available on the Droid early next year. But even though the iPhone has had tethering capability since a July software update, AT&T has neither turned on the feature nor set a timetable for doing so. On the other hand, Verizon is notoriously the most expensive cellular provider so you pay for that network coverage.

The choice in a nutshell is whether to go with slickest computer-phone or the slickest network. If Droid can make customers at least debate the question, it will be a success for Verizon.

Operating Systems: Paying for Their Mistakes

You gotta love the software business. There are -- excluding Wall Street bailouts, of course -- very few industries where you can get the consumer to pay for your mistakes.

Case in point: this year’s new operating system releases from Apple (Snow Leopard) and Microsoft (Windows 7).

An OS is the basic underpinning of a computer’s software serving as a kind a middleman between the hardware and other applications. Both companies had pretty good operating systems on the market a few years ago. Microsoft had released Windows XP in 2001 and by 2005 a series of service packs -- the term the industry uses for major-but-free software overhauls -- had cured enough bugs to make it efficient and reliable. Also in 2005, Apple rolled out Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger,” which was highly regarded for user-friendly feature sets and good performance.

Then in 2007 things went wrong.

For Apple they went slightly wrong. Its 10.5 “Leopard” system added a variety of features such as built-in backup and (catching up with Windows) a center for playing multimedia. It also offered support for 64-bit applications -- the previous standard was 32-bit -- which allow computers to run faster if they have processors with that capability.

The problem was the Leopard supported both Macs with Apple’s old PowerPC processors and newer units with the new Intel processor technology. Leopard consumed a great deal of disk space and users who upgraded from Tiger commonly experienced degraded performance. Macs that had been zippy with Tiger were slow to boot up and sluggish in loading applications. In my testing, I found that PowerPC users should avoid it.

While Apple has never admitted that trying to bridge the two processor technologies had compromised the OS, the fact is that the Intel-only OS 10.6 “Snow Leopard” released earlier this year is a speedier and more reliable system on an Intel Mac. I recommend the upgrade, especially since Apple gave it a modest price: $30 for a single Mac; $60 for a family pack to upgrade five Macs.

Windows is another story.

Long delayed (to the point of forcing company reorganizations and a few executive resignations/firings), the Vista operation system appeared on the market in 2007 as well.

And bombed.

Reviewers panned it for being unreliable, buggy, and appallingly slow. It was a huge hardware resource hog, which made those who upgraded older computers regret that they had done so. Users found that applications or devices on their PCs were constantly at war with Vista. Corporate users, always a prime market for Microsoft but especially so for Vista because it was designed to fix major security flaws in XP, stayed away in droves.

New PC customers started ordering units with XP instead of Vista and continued even after Microsoft attempted to discourage the practice.

So in October, Microsoft released Windows 7, which is for all intents and purposes a debugged incarnation of Vista. Some major reviewers have given it glowing marks, which leads me to wonder if some of my colleagues live in a different plane of reality from ordinary users. In my testing, Windows 7 fixed the most annoying problems with Vista but was not as spectacular an improvement as some testimonials would have you believe.

In an upgrade installation, I found that Windows 7 ended the handful of software and hardware incompatibility woes that had cropped up over time in Vista, but didn’t make the test system noticeably faster. A “clean” installation of Window 7 on a wiped hard drive produced a little better performance -- but that’s pretty much true of any clean installation of any OS ever made.

While it boots up faster than Vista did, Windows 7 is still slow in launching applications. It has some nice interface touches -- for example, in giving you a preview of what’s open in other applications when you are switching from one to the other. It also supports touch-screen PCs. But the fact is that with respect to productivity, a PC running Windows 7 and Office 2007 (Microsoft’s other flagship product) offers very little advantage over the Windows XP - Office 2003 combo. This is not my idea of progress.

Windows 7 also has lawyer-inflicted quirks. Because of the various antitrust actions against Microsoft, the company does not include email and other small applications on the installation DVD. This is apparently to ensure that PC makers feel free to install non-Microsoft software. If you want the Microsoft versions, you need to download them from Microsoft’s website.

I would certainly recommend that purchasers of new PCs go with Windows 7. It is more secure and more modern than XP.

Upgrades are a more difficult call. Microsoft has set hefty pricetags on Windows upgrades. The current street prices range from just over $100 for the Home Premium upgrade (the version most non-corporate users will need) to $200 for the top-of-the-line Ultimate edition. Also, while Microsoft allows for “in-place” upgrades (that is, changing the OS while leaving data and applications undisturbed) for Vista, you have to start from scratch with XP.

My advice to XP users would be to stand pat until you are ready to replace your PC. But if you have Vista, get rid of it. Just don’t pay any more for your upgrade than you have to.

The Beatles sounded like THAT?

With the release of the remastered CD editions of their albums and singles the Beatles once more have broken new musical ground: giving fans the chance to experience updated recordings that sound dramatically better than the originals ever did.

As I did my listening marathon working my way through the stereo remaster collection, I kept thinking: “Hey, these guys really were as good as I thought they were.”

Back in the day, you never really could tell. A typical Beatlemania era concert was more about screaming crowds than the band’s music. The music systems of the ‘60s were primitive and stereo was then an innovation. (That’s why purists regard the mono collection as more definitive of the Beatles work.) George Martin, the Beatles’ justly celebrated producer, did great work with the technology of the times. But all in all Beatles recordings were a muffled mess and stayed that way through their march from LP disks and singles to tape to CD.

While their ‘60s rivals The Rolling Stones updated their CDs regularly to reflect updates in technology (and also stayed together as an act for all the intervening years), the Beatles catalog up until now has been frozen in time to the start of the CD era. The remasters for the first time use digital technology to restore lost frequencies, eliminate analog recording noise (such as tape hiss), and achieve proper stereo separation.

The result is a revelation.

For one thing, the traditional view of the Beatles -- great songwriters, but modestly talented singers and musicians -- is just wrong. Particularly on the early recordings which used to sound like a musical mush, the remasters now clearly define the four instrumental performances and vocals. Turns out, Paul McCartney and John Lennon had much more distinctive vocal styles than we realized at the time. (Come on, Baby Booomers, confess: you always faked it when you identified a song as a “John” or a “Paul” lead vocal.) Ringo did a lot more cymbal work and also played a wider range of percussion instruments than we ever knew. George’s guitar work was solid.

It is particularly fascinating to discover on the remasters that the Beatles accents were much apparent on their vocals than when we heard the originals.

Perhaps the biggest deal on the remaster is that their lyrics are now are crystal clear. If you work your way through them chronologically like I did, you can see them evolve from their early routine love songs with a rock beat into their later complex poetry with a sophisticated soundscape.

I periodically gripe that I have paid for the Beatles songs way too many times. But I don’t begrudge this investment. The Beatles never sounded better. Literally.

Can Do

It’s a rule of high-end headphones that open-back designs always outperform sealed designs. But Denon, the Japanese high-end audio conglomerate, has just broken the rules.

The terminology refers to the outside casing of the headphones. Open designs have (doh!) openings so that the sound waves from the speaker drivers (the devices that make the sound) can radiate outward. In sealed designs the back is solid and sound waves stay inside. The sealed design, which broadcast and audio engineers favor, is why their slang for headphones is “cans” -- which is what a sealed phone resembles.

While closed architecture means you don’t disturb the person next to you and external noise is reduced, it also usually means that what you hear sounds muffled because the drivers are working with a confined volume of air.

Denon’s D2000/D5000/D7000 series of audiophile headphones magically avoid that. It’s not magic, of course, but solid design and quality components. But one has to guess exactly how they did it because Denon resisted the temptation to hype its product cutesy brand names for its design or technobabble bragging on its marketing materials.

The result in any case is a pair of headphones that have a spacious, three dimensional sound. You experience the audio as if you are listening in a roomy environment with the performers and instruments placed around you. (Excellent “soundstage” in audio jargon.) Listening to headphones sometimes can be tiring because you sense the sound blasting into each year with little in the middle.

Denons are strong in the midrange and highs, with a solid but not obtrusive bass. If your tastes run to the harder forms of rock and you want all bass, all the time, look elsewhere. Classical and jazz sound vibrant while rock and pop are crisp. As with all high end headphones, you will hear the difference between top-rate and mediocre audio engineering work on recording and between audiophile and lower quality recording technologies. Hint: low-quality MP3 will sound horrible.

While the headphones are large in size, they are lightweight and comfortable. Most wearers will particularly like the fact that the Denons put relatively little pressure on the side of your head; none of that vice-clamp-like grip that many large headphones have. If there is a downside, it’s that despite the closed back, the Denons do not seem to block out as much external noise as one might like. I’m guessing that’s the downside of the soft pressure and soft padding on the earcups.

The other downside is the effect on your wallet. The three models are priced at outrageous ($1,000), expensive ($600 list but available for less than $500), and pricey ($300). Not something for an impulse buy. But the if you are a serious music lover, you will love the Denon sound.

The Paper PC: CompuServe Classic: So Long, Old Friend

Robert S. Anthony notes the passing of the service that gave many users (including me) their first exposure to online communications.

The Paper PC: CompuServe Classic: So Long, Old Friend

Lost and Found for iPhones

You’re having “one of those days” in which you are rushing from one thing to another and barely have time to think. At some point in the day, you reach for your cell phone and it’s not there!

Panic ensues. Did you in your haste to get out the door in the morning simply leave the phone at home? Is it sitting in your car attached to the charger? Did you put it down at one of your stops and forget to take it? Did you drop it somewhere? Most important is it simply lost or has someone walked away with it?

Apple just created a solution as part of its recent iPhone 3.0 software update: “Find My iPhone and Remote Wipe.”

It does just what the name says: it will locate your iPhone and if necessary wipe all your private data from it. It also allows you to send a message to your iPhone that will cause the unit to sound an alert and flash the message (typically you would use it to provide information on how to return it to you).

The service works via Apple’s MobileMe Internet network and uses the iPhone’s built-in GPS capabilities. Aside from its practical values, it also has great show-off capabilities because the process is highly entertaining.

Users log into their MobileMe website, navigate to account settings (as an extra security measure, they will be required to supply their passwords a second time), and then click on the Find My iPhone button. That brings up a Google map in which a circle shows the phone’s location. Apple refines the GPS data so the experience is that one usually sees the circle centered somewhere in the general vicinity of where the phone might be; then the circle nudges itself into a more exact position.

When I tested this from my home, which is near the Charles River, the first data placed the phone on the other side of the river. Then the refined information slowly moves the location across the river, then moved through some adjacent property, and finally although not pinpointing my exact apartment does center on the building’s front door – which is close enough for me. In fact, any closer and I would start to worry about Apple taking the microtargeting concept to grave extremes.

Curiously Find My iPhone was little publicized in reviews of the 3.0 software update and latest generation of iPhones. Perhaps this is because the MobileMe service cost $99 per year and had major glitches when it was launched a year ago. But many of the new features that got more attention, such as cut-and-paste text capabilities or video cameras on the new iPhone 3GS aren’t especially innovative. BlackBerries and other smartphones have had those features for years.

Find my iPhone is an important innovation, one that will become even more important as people and companies fully appreciate how much sensitive data we actually carry around with us on today’s cell phones. I expect this to be a trend setter and the odds are high that other cellphone makers and cellular service provides aren’t even now as we speak kicking themselves for having failed to think of it first.

Expect MobileMe to be challenged quickly by Me, Too.

Tuning in on HD Radio

Cellphones went digital. Broadcast TV is going digital. So where’s digital broadcast radio?

Well, it’s here. But you might not necessarily notice it.

Four AM and 20 FM channels in the Greater Boston area are offering HDRadio, which provides digital signals. But unless you have radio equipped to receive them, you wouldn’t know they are there.

HDRadio came to my attention only because a receiver was bundled with the navigation package in my car and because of a David Pogue column in The New York Times. (Disclosure: I mention Pogue mainly because I don’t want the Plagiarism Police to pounce on me for observing some of the same things that he did.)

For example, I, too, am bemused by the fact that the “HD” in HDRadio doesn’t actually stand for anything. Indeed, iBiquity Digital Corp. – the electronics company that invented it – takes the unusual step in its PR materials of pointing out that the designation does not mean, as one might guess, “high definition” or “hybrid digital.” It’s just a brand name.

The way it works is that digital information is embedded in a HDRadio station’s standard analog radio signal. The overlay can simply be a digital version of the normal programming or may contain up to two additional channels. A HD receiver will detect and decode the information and switch over to digital mode. This means that with a home or office radio there is a discernable delay before the digital broadcast kicks in. When the radio is in motion, as in a car, your broadcast will shift back and forth between modes depending on how good the signal is.

Polk Audio loaned me one of its iSonic ES2s, a combination HDRadio and iPod speaker system, for this test. Like all one-piece systems, its stereo separation is limited to its width. Polk engineers decided to work around that by mounting speakers front and rear to create a 360 soundfield that would sound OK no matter where in a room you listen. I give them partial credit – the 360 effect is there, but the sound lacks some depth. At its original list price of $500, the ES2 was frankly not a good value. Recently the price has gone down to $400, and you can find them for a more reasonable $350.

The combination of HDRadio and iPod docking adds another feature: iTunes “tagging.” Information about the song that’s being played is also embedded in the radio signal. When the song is one that’s in Apple’s iTunes Music Store and you have an iPod docked in the device, a button on the radio illuminates. Push the button and the song information gets stored on the iPod. When you next sync it to your computer, a playlist of potential purchases is created in iTunes. While mainly a marketing ploy, this is an interesting marriage of modern music technologies that consumers likely will see more of in the future.

Polk’s PR representative warned me that antennas and antenna placement (two different kinds of FM and one AM antennas are included) were going to be a key factor in getting the HD signal. Indoor radio reception, especially in urban areas, always is a hassle. This is compounded, though, with HDRadio because the digital stream is pretty much all or nothing. As it turned out, the supplied antennas did just fine, and I was able to pick up almost all the local HD stations.

Alas the technology’s pluses do not rise to “must have” magnitude. The HD signal is clear and static-free, which makes for a nice improvement on FM and a spectacular one on AM. But it’s still the same old programming. Even when the station uses the multi-channel option, it’s usually just more of the same.

I found only two of the 24 local HD stations doing something that was worth noting. WBZ 1030, the AM news and talk station, truly profits from HD mode. The newscasts are clear and crisp instead sounding like they are coming from a closet. PBS station WGBH-FM uses all three possible channels and does so to good effect, delivering, for example, classical on one, jazz on another, and news on the third. Unfortunately they are the exception rather than the rule.

So while HDRadio may be the wave of the future, that future isn’t here yet.

Photo Pizzaz

Usually this column’s concept of software “find” is a nifty bit of shareware (try-before-you-buy programs from small vendors) that offer a helpful function for small dollars. Alien Skin Software’s products are nifty enough, but not small dollar items. But they are so nifty, they are worth a look if you are at all serious about digital photography.

In recent months, the North Carolina-based company has rolled out three new releases of key products that have impressed me a lot:

- Image Doctor 2
- Blow Up 2
- Snap Art 2

These all are “filter” software that plug into Adobe Photoshop and also Photoshop Elements, both for PCs and Macs. Unfortunately they have list prices of $200-$250 each because they are aimed at graphics professionals, which puts them out of reach for most consumers. An Internet search for better deals will help you save some. But I don’t want anyone to think that this is an inexpensive undertaking.

Nevertheless, what the programs do is so helpful – in pretty much the order of priority shown above – that consumers might want to consider them.

Image Doctor (which I have seen priced a low as $125) is an invaluable retouching tool, which has a number of components that let you retouch old, scratchy photos (really, any physical print you have digitized) and cover-up blemishes and defects. Two functions I use the most are “JPEG Repair” and “Smart Fill.”

The former deals with the fact that to reduce file size, the JPEG format discards some picture information and as a result when you look at a highly compressed picture there will be visible defects in the form of visual “noise” – pixels that are the wrong color or are grainy. The repair tool extrapolates the JPEG data and produces a smooth image.

Smart Fill, which I use all the time, lets you select an offending part of your picture and make it disappear by covering it over with the adjacent background. For example, I came back from a trip to Arizona with a pretty landscape of the signature red hills of Sedona – with power lines cutting across the sky. To make it something I wanted to print and put on my wall, I used Smart Fill to hide the power lines and show only clear blue sky.

Blow Up, as you would guess, lets you scale up a picture to a larger size. It is not as essential a tool as Image Doctor, but if you are fond of buying poster-sized prints from your photo vendor, Blow Up helps a lot. If you only want to print a section of the original photo, you can very easily wind up with a cropped photo that does not have sufficient resolution to sustain acceptable quality for oversized prints. Blow Up 2 lets you crop and increase the resolution to fix the problem.

Snap Art, I must confess, is not a “must;” it’s just fun. Basically it takes a photo and converts it to look like artwork: oil painting, watercolor, pencil sketch, even impressionist painting. The new version 2 adds a much wider range of presets than the original and also produces much more convincing results. Turn your family picture into a family portrait. Make the landscape photos from your last trip into landscape paintings.

Maybe not the most essential thing on Earth, but it will transform mundane snapshots into something with more visual impact.

Trouble in medialand

A major media organization is struggling with dismal financial results, expecting new rounds of layoffs, and it’s future is highly uncertain:

Yahoo!

Oh, did you think I was referring to The Boston Globe? Well, them, too.

Obviously, the newspaper business is going through hard times, which I take personally. One of my prior employers, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver just folded. My sense of regret there being compounded by my view that its owner, E.W. Scripps, has left a trail of dead newspapers in its wake for years – starting long before the Internet ever became a threat to traditional media.

The fact of the matter is that it is tough to make a buck selling content. Intellectual property is ephemeral and as a result companies tend to focus on some kind of tangible deliverable as their “product.” So it is the physical newspaper that newspaper companies sell rather than the words on the paper. Along comes the Internet and suddenly customers can get the words without buying the paper. Similarly, Yahoo! peddled its visible web presence rather than its mix of search results, portal (home page) content, and advertising. Along came Google, which blended those components more effectively and kept adding new products into the mix, and Yahoo! became an also-ran.

Different products. Same result.

We are so accustomed these days to think about how technology drives social and economic changes that we forget that the reverse is even more important: social and economic changes create a niche that new products and services will fill.

To stick with newspapers, my career dates back to 1969 when I started an evening shift general assignment reporter with The Patriot Ledger. While the Internet has been one factor in what has happened to the Ledger since then, it isn’t the only factor or even necessarily the most important one.

In 1969, the Quincy shipyards were still open (albeit troubled) and Massachusetts was still a manufacturing center. There were local department stores and local food stores. Auto dealers had one or two stores, not mammoth chains. The Ledger was an evening newspaper the delivery of which was based on the traditional sequence of delivery boys and girls getting out of school just in time to get the papers to the homes of workers, from the shipyards and elsewhere, who were coming off the day shift. Local merchants were the core of the paper’s advertising base. The story was much the same for The Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence and for thousands of other newspapers.

Then the world changed faster than the papers could keep up.

The traditional manufacturing industries went into decline while local businesses were bought up or failed. An increasingly white-collar audience preferred morning delivery to evening. Suburban papers had to fight more intensely with metropolitan papers for ad dollars. People’s lifestyles became fast-paced and they found it hard to make time for such things as long newspaper articles.

Technology for a time was actually the newspaper business’s friend as computerization eliminated many skilled jobs and generally cut costs. It also enhanced the product. The Eagle-Tribune, for example, led the region in the introduction of color printing for the daily paper – doing so long before USA Today was even created.

Now technology is seen as the enemy: a way to get newspaper content without paying for it. But, in truth, all the Internet really has done is make obsolete a business model that dates back to the 19th century: a product printed on paper that is financed primarily by advertising, with some share paid by the subscribers. Nothing says that this mix has to be immutable. Perhaps subscribers should pay more. Or advertisers should. Maybe cost structures should be based on using electrons instead of dead trees. Or maybe even a formula based on the special characteristics of the new medium.

In my last column I wrote about the tradeoffs between privacy and using the Internet as a data repository. Walter Bender, the former head of the MIT Media Lab, has theorized that tradeoff could itself be the basis of a new business model for the news industry. People pay more for content if they want anonymity. Or they can pay less but share personal information so that advertisers can more profitably target their ads.

Therein may lie MSM’s (“mainstream media”) last, best hope. Google has pretty much locked up the invade-your-privacy-so-we-can-target-advertising-at-you market. “Pay to play” (subscription only) has been a failure. The tradeoff approach is one that has yet to be tested.

And it’s not as if the newspaper business has any better idea to try.

Upgrade or downshift?

An economic crisis can put many things in an entirely new light – even routine software upgrades. Consider, for example, some recent releases from Adobe and FileMaker.

Adobe’s flagship product is its Creative Suite 4 graphics, web design, publishing, and multimedia packages, which cost several hundred dollars each. However, it also offers a consumer collection, Photoshop Elements 7 and Premiere Elements 7 for Windows, which has a street price of about $120. (The two are available separately, but the bundle is the best deal.)

No, the Elements software doesn’t do everything, or even most of the things, that the CS4 packages do. Photoshop Elements is a picture cataloging and editing program aimed at non-professionals. Premiere fits the same niche for video camera users. Most consumers – myself included – find that Elements fits their needs precisely.

There have been people, though, with a high-end camera or videocam who believed they simply MUST have the full versions of Photoshop or Premiere and perhaps even a CS4 bundle that includes them. In happier times, that was an uncomplicated indulgence. Today, not so much. Not when discretionary incomes are tight and – equally important – when the Elements package has evolved into very cool software.

The early editions of Elements were essentially copies of Photoshop or Premiere with key features disabled. The 7 versions have adopted distinctive and more user-friendly interfaces than the pro versions and automate some key tasks. In truth, Elements let you do your tasks much more quickly than the pro varieties.

The same principle applies to Mac users with FileMaker’s Bento database program, now in Version 2. The update adds a couple of features I find essential: the ability to import Excel files (which most users employ for databases until they step up to a dedicated database program) and to include mail messages in your database.

More to the point, it is a database that doesn’t look or feel like a database. Its look is intentionally modeled after iTunes or Apple’s mail and calendar programs, which set industry standards for ease of use. To create a relational database in Bento (a powerful database management tool that ties one set of data to another) you don’t do any complex programming as you do with more elaborate database software. You simply drag some data from one Bento file to another and – poof! – you’ve got a relational database.

Bento does not have anything like the power of the company’s professional FileMaker Pro 9. But then again its street price is $45 compared to $261 for FileMaker Pro. There are times for business use when I simply have to have FileMaker’s capabilities. For personal use, however, Bento has all the database capability most of us need.

In these times, taking a step down in software power can be a step up in sensible computing.