1 comments about Disney's Print Studio 101 Dalmatians.

1. I BOUGHT THIS SOFTWARE THINKING IT WAS LIKE THE OTHER DISNEY SOFTWARE PRINTSTUDIO'S BUT IT WASN'T. IT LIMITED THE PROJECTS CHOICES AND USES. I WOULDN'T BUY IT AGAIN, OR AS A GIFT. I COULDN'T EVEN GIVE IT AWAY.

No comments about Synergy Kaleidagraph 4.0 Single User.

5 comments about Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Deluxe.

1. Home Designer is a great tool for preparing to build a home. The hard copy manual has a lot to be desired. Also this program should have a laminated quick chart for the symbols on the design page.
   There are a lot of things that the program takes for granted that you should know. I guess if you would have started with one of BH&G cheaper versions there may have been a better learning curve that would carry over to the deluxe.
   
   It's like taking Chemistry 2 without taking Chemistry 1. Hope that makes sense.
   
   Overall....very happy I purchased this software...
   Dan Manley
   Commercial Photographer
   Plano, Texas



2. I have owned this product for about two weeks, so this is a very preliminary "first look" type review. Background.. I am an aerospace engineer (not an architect) but have some experience with simple generic drawing programs (eg, Visio), and am very computer savvy. The reason for this purchase is my wife and I are buying an abandoned 10 acre farm (with a very rough, 1880s style farmhouse) and I wanted to sketch out possible floor plans for renovation and additions to the house.
   
   Why this program? I struggled over this and really the only other option, Punch Home Design Arch Series 18 in this price range. Reviews from various sources had these two about equal. I chose the BHG/Chief Architect app simply from the website information available. While the BHG site listed all of their various home design program applications and a detailed feature list with checkmarks, I never did find the same level of information on the Punch website - it was more glittzy than informative. So I went with BHG.
   
   OK first off, I am the type that DOES read the instruction manual :). So the first thing I did was read through the book. It wasnt that bad, maybe an hour or so to get the "jist" of how the program worked.
   
   It installed flawlessly. My system: 2.4MHz Intel, 4GB RAM, 40GB HD, Win XP. I did not bother with the tutorials - never opened the CD case that held them. The program immediately (upon online registration) identified that a patch was available, and this also downloaded and installed without a hitch.
   
   Since I had read the instruction manual, and also was familiar with how toolbars worked, I had no real difficulty in sketching out the outside walls of the house (I had previously taken actual dimensions of the old house). To me, it seems very intuitive. You click, drag and it appears. Interior walls are easy to create and they snap to the closest outside or inside wall. Click on a wall and drag it one way or the other and watch the inside dimension arrow until you get it where you want it.
   
   I have spent about 16 hours with the program so far. The areas where I actually had to access the online help or go back to the manual were dealing with stairwells (they automatically generate but its a bit tricky to get them to "open" to the floor below), and the automatic roof generation (which works adequately, but not a lot of freedom to modify, but that may be a good thing). File size may be an issue. I have saved several different configurations of the overall plan, and each seems to take up about 3-5MB of hard disk space. Delete that old Sims game and all of its expansion packs before you fire this puppy up!
   
   The 3D views are cool, but they do take a while to redraw. My simple plan already has over 50,000 surfaces, that need to be redrawn with each view. Watch out for rooms that do not start their elevation on the same "baseline" or have the same room height. This was a pain to deal with non-standard 9-foot ceilings, and changing the foundation height after the entire plan was constructed was a bad idea on my part.
   
   Overall, I am very pleased with how this has turned out. The files generated will transfer to other more robust architectural programs. Our plan is to give this to our architect electronically so that she can "fix" the problems in my design. Four stars because I'm sure there are better, more expensive programs, but this is just the right level of complexity for me that balances with the capability I need.



3. I purchased Home Designer Deluxe to help remodel my home. My wife and I are doing a major kitchen remodel and are considering moving some interior walls and bumping out an exterior wall. In addition to exploring different floor plans, we wanted to try different furniture arrangements for the living and dining rooms. Rather than hiring an architect up front, we figured we could explore many options on our own and minimize the architect's time. Home Designer Deluxe enabled us to do all of this. It is an excellent product for the price. It has a low learning curve and allows creation and modification of floor plans very quickly. But its biggest benefit was the ability to get a three dimensional view of walking through the house. The camera views give one a sense of proportion and mass, of openness and closeness. In the kitchen we tried different cabinet layouts and appliance locations and found some of the ideas we thought would be great looked terrible; and vice versa. I feel Home Designer has been instrumental in evaluation of a wide variety of remodel ideas and has given us a much better idea of what we want; and what we don't want.
   
   With any program there are limitations, most of which I could get around and most of which are included in the Home Designer Professional version. For example, I could not change the thickness of the walls so I found either the size of the interior rooms would be off by a couple inches or the overall dimensions of the house would be off. I opted to make the rooms their exact size so I would have their exact interior dimensions for the architect and let the overall length and width of the house be a bit off. I was not able to draw our angled walls in something other that 7.5 degree increments. But this was not a part of the house I was changing so it didn't matter. I was not able to create an angled staircase. Home Designer has some CAD tools but it is not a CAD program. When trying to so a site plan I found the dimension tools would attach to the roof lines rather than the ground level sidewalks I was trying to dimension. I also found dimension lines could not be attached to an arbitrary point on an object, the program always wanted to determine where to end the dimension line. So I drew my site plan with other tools.
   
   There is one major item that would be very helpful to include in this version of Home Designer Deluxe. The inability to change multiple similar items at the same time was very frustrating. I wanted to be able to change all the kitchen cabinets along one wall to add 4 inches to their depth, and I wanted to change their materials. I had to change every cabinet individually which was a lot of work given how many parts of each cabinet I had to change, multiplied by the number of upper and lower cabinets. It became very time consuming to evaluate more than a few different cabinet ideas. The ability to change multiple objects at one time would add a lot to this version of the program.
   
   Overall, it's a very helpful program.



4. its easy program i am happy in the first time i like to decorate and renew my house by design it and decorate and built another 2 floors i can see by trying and drwong in 3d thats is easy and any any body can use this program you can make a plans and can build your own house from exterir and enterior desighn and biuld its great and its include all the furnutures and beds and kitchen products to complete the house its very very nice to see how is you house will be befor you do it thanks for this program



5. I think this product is great! I don't know any "technical" lingo when it comes to architecture so I was a true novice. I could still navigate the program and, thanks to the tutorials, I managed to find my way around the program and learned how to use the tools. I was interested in a remodel to our current house and had no idea of what I wanted for sure and how it would work and look with our current house plan. This program enabled me to do this work on my own without hiring it done and I was able to make decisions and change that decision and then change that decision again! I do wish it had a few more options that I was looking for, and maybe it does and I haven't stumbled across them yet. It does the job -- it gives me the basic house plan to take to the contractor and they can give it the fine tuning it needs.

No comments about The Print Shop Standard Edition.

1 comments about Adobe Technical Communication Suite.

1. We use CS3 but this suite is great as addition next to it to simplify our efforts to document what we sell. This is something we definately will be using a lot to publish content on our secure website for our reseller channels.

5 comments about Pinnacle Studio Version 8.

1. Don't buy it. My kids will probably all gratuate from college before I can get a DVD project completed with this software. It is a lemon. It has awesome features, which makes the experience all the more bitter. You think you've created a masterpiece, and then some software bug corrupts your project and makes a DVD unproducable. It'll fail you when you most need it.

   If Pinnacle ever gets their act together, I'll revise this review. But for now, I'd give it negative stars if I could.




2. Do yourself a favor, google search for +pinnacle +audio +synch (or better yet "oos" for "out of synch"). Do it for either for web pages or (news)groups. You will find expert after expert computer users who all come to same problem. this consistantly creates dvds where the audio and video are not synchornized. Your end product, no matter whether you captured off TV, you video taped home movies, or a state of the art home digital source, like a $1,500 digital movie camera, will all come out like badly dubbed Kung Foo movie.

   Pinnacle's own web support boards are filled with people having this problem, and many others and stunned by the total lack of technical support, or any Pinnacle response for that matter.

   If, by hook or by crook, you do get someone from pinnacle support to answer you on audio synch they will tell you the problem is with your capture and not the studio 8 program. You can explain til the cows come home that every media player on your computer results in a perfectly synched playback of your original so it is not the problem.

   Last you will be steered to their apparently endless set of "beta" fixes...they are on 8.10.4.0 as of today. None of the last dozen or so beta's have fixed this problem, but it will keep you busy installing.




3. This is the most frustrating software I've ever used at home. I've been trying to get it to work since March (7 months), and it's STILL a no go. I've spent countless hours dong everything from building a new high-end system to flashing my BIOS. Each phase fixes one problem only to run into another one. I can capture from 20 seconds to 4 minutes of video before my PC locks up so tight I have to call the power company to shut down our local grid to reboot. If it worked, it would be a AWESOME product. However, after seven months of scouring the Pinnacle web and other sites, and many Pinnacle updates - it still doesn't work. If you want frustration, then this is THE product for you!



4. I bought the Pinnacle MovieBox USB which came with Studio 8. The device has been making grinding noises after only 10 uses, and there are major bugs with Studio 8 which render it useless. And most importantly, Pinnacle DOES NOT PROVIDE ANY SUPPORT! They only have user forums (which I suggest you read first). If you don't believe me, just try finding a technical support phone # or e-mail address! The most blatant problem which has been outstanding since I purchased it is the "OOS" (audio out of sync), which makes the sound of any DVD you create a few seconds ahead or behind of the actual video. There is NOTHING you can do to fix the problem except hope it doesn't happen to you (usually for vids over 1 hour). The second biggest problem is the PC freezing every 30 seconds which even CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't let you close the app. And you lose all your edits! I don't know what else is out there, but this was a $200 bust for me. BTW, I have a top-of-the-line PC. Before you buy any capture devices/software, you should have a fast CPU, lost of RAM, at least firewire or USB 2, and a large and fast hard drive (pref. 2). Otherwise, you'll have choppy video.



5. Well i have an moviebox usb too and ehh no problems at all !
   Only rendering is quit slow (i'm using FULL h/w acceleration now and it takes about 5 hours for an 2 hour dvd, but while most people are complaning about the a/v sync, its better here than the Ulead media software witch gives me over 5 seconds delay!
   It seems that studio is also depending on directx (and youre video-adapter)
   i'm using
   Hardware: Amd 2000+ with 512 mb ram 80gb and 120gb harddrive,NEC1100a dvd-burner.Gforce 4MX440(64mb),sb-audigy,usb 2.0 bla bla bla
   Software : windows XP,Pinnacle Studio 8.10,directx 9 and always the latest drivers!
   And its realy giving me no trouble, by the way, if you record youre video directly on the disired bitrate then rerendering is very fast!!

No comments about Learn To Play Guitar (Jewel Case).

No comments about Turbocad Professional V14 Precision 2D Drafting 3D Modeling.

1 comments about Flash Ad Creator.

1. I was disapponted in the lack of options you had with this software. I wanted to make small flash intros and customize small flash presentations. Unfortunatley you can only change the texts and very limited pictures in this software, you cannot change animations and sound. Not what I thought it was by reading the discription.

1 comments about Garfield - Mad About Cats.

1. I've had a blast with this game. The animation is hilarious, Odie really takes some hilarious abuse, and the "disco John" game cracks me up everytime. All the fun and wit Garfield fans are accustomed to.