5 comments about Knowledge Adventure Books by You Win/Mac.

1. I purchased this item for my 8 year old granddaughter for Christmas. She loves to write and has found this item to be a lot of fun. She has found it very easy to use and a great help in creating her stories.



2. As my daughter enjoys reading and writing stories, I thought this program would be fun. But to my disappointment, she didn't like it, as all it was is a fill in the blank program, and the program writes the story for you.



3. Like some of the other reviewers have said, all you do is fill in some one word answers in a story that's already written. Thought my child was going to get to do alot more creative writing.



4. This is NOT "Books By You!" This is "Books By John Lithgow!" The description is misleading. I thought this software would enable my daughter (age 9) to write and print her own books. NOT SO. Kids are simply filling in the blanks of provided stories. My daughter played with this for 20 minutes and hasn't touched it since. Absolutely UNINSPIRING! A waste of money.



5. The Mom's Choice Awards® honors excellence in family-friendly media, products and services. An esteemed panel of judges includes education, media and other experts as well as parents, children, librarians, performing artists, producers, medical and business professionals, authors, scientists and others. A sampling of the panel members includes: Dr. Twila C. Liggett, Ten-time Emmy-winner, professor and founder of Reading Rainbow; Julie Aigner-Clark, Creator of Baby Einstein and The Safe Side Project; Jodee Blanco, New York Times Best-Selling Author; LeAnn Thieman, Motivational speaker and coauthor of seven Chicken Soup For The Soul books; Tara Paterson, Certified Parent Coach, and founder of The Just For Mom Foundation(tm) and the Mom's Choice Awards®. Parents and educators look for the Mom's Choice Awards® seal in selecting quality materials and products for children and families. This product has been honored by this distinguished award.

1 comments about The Print Shop Elements: Labels, Logos & More.

1. I found that this item had a good selection of logo templates, it was difficult to manuever and was not able to produce a logo that I liked enough to use for my business.

No comments about Pro 3D Graphics Animation Design w/Game Studio.

5 comments about Optics Pro Standard v5.2 Software.

1. IF YOU SHOOT WITH A DSLR YOU HAVE TO HAVE THIS PRODUCT, IT'S AUTOMATIC!!



2. Did the DxO press release state that their software will not run on a 64 bit Windows operating system? If so, I missed seeing it... I'm running 64 bit Windows Vista.
   
   After repeated attempts to install from the DxO CD Rom -- without any success -- the installer simply "went away" each time -- I finally got up on a 'DxO Image Science' web page where, after much searching,I found an obscure FAQ column which stated that DxO Pro5 will not run on a 64 bit system.
   
   "Sorry about that" say the DxO people. "We will let you know if and when we update to 64 bit." I wouldn't want to hang that long.
   
   Microsoft, where are you? These people at Image Science actually make your people look good!!! Forgive me O'Lord!!



3. A difficult one to review. First I was sent version 4 even though I clearly bought, as you can see, v5. Luckily I managed to use the v4 activation key to do a manual activation on the web site, get access to v5, and download and install that one instead.
   
   Once you get v5, it's a mixed bag. It appears to be quite a buggy product, failing at random - but when it works it's outstanding. v5.0.4 seems to be a reasonable improvement on the earlier versions, which were dreadful to start with.



4. When DXO works its great. Once again, DXO decided in the middle of my work, that it was a demo copy and had expired!! It would not activate and their web site would only produce "EZ Publish" errors. It activated the next day after two attempts. I work in the field and do not always have access to an internet connection. This is a professional product and after it has been bought and activated I think that I have a right to expect it to work and not get in the way of finishing my projects! This is the third time in about 5 months that it has reverted to a demo copy. It apparently the uses Pace Interlock DRM which can cause all kinds of problems if it decides you are a pirate.
   
   My computer is running XP-Pro, with current patches, DXO was the only application I had running, and I was in the field and NOT connected to the internet.
   
   If wasn't for this problem I would give it 5 stars but it has let me down twice in the middle of a project and I had to use other tools to finish because I couldn't get it to reactivate in a timely manner.



5. This is lazy man's dream: using pre-calculated tables it fixes all distortion in all supported lens and camera bodies. But that's just the start. It saves even the pictures otherwise ruined.
   
   It's especially great for those who can't be bothered with investing half a lifetime in mastering Photoshop. It's a lot easier and more intuitive that Lightroom and any other RAW converter. Works with tiff/jpg as well.
   
   It's the best piece of software I ever purchased. Period :)

No comments about PowerDVD 8 Deluxe.

2 comments about Disney's Dinosaur Action Game (Jewel Case).

1. Dinosaur is an adventure game, and every time you play you find something new. This is a very fun game based on the movie Dinosaur. It is exciting to play this game because you don't know what you can do until you see it. In this game there are 14 really fun levels, and I am on 9!



2. This game was very frustrating, because every time I entered a new mission, I got completly stumped. I ended up playing the previos mission instead, and that`s not very fun because I already know how to complete that mission.

   I am currently on mission 9. I thought making Aladar running from Carnotaurs would be easy, but they got the best of me. Another hard mission was 6, running against the clock. I think what made mission 9 so tough is those rocks. When Aladar knocked them away, the Carnotaurs got him (picked him up and shook him). I got to the pillar part only twice, and that was even harder. Aladar had to go up, a ramp, knock down a pillar, and then go down and up the next ramp to block the Carnotaurs, and they got him again.

   Another problem was the violence. There was alought of blood when fighting. A game I play at my school, called Nanosaur, didn`t have any blood or even bodies, just an explosion. It didn`t even show fighting, just dinosaurs jumping and bullets. Another thing about this game is that it wasn`t very much like the movie. Some of the missions weren`t in the movie. And most of the enemies weren`t in the movie either. The only ones were Veloceraptor, Oviraptor and Carnotaur.

   The reason I gave it a average rating was when the missions aren`t frustrating, they are fun. My favorites are missions 4 & 5. They are quite entertaining. I tried to put it on my windows 98, but it was slow and the graphics were bad. So I use it on my dad`s ME.

No comments about Teach Yourself to Play Piano Deluxe.

5 comments about Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Premium [Mac] [OLD VERSION].

1. Great product. I use CS3 every day and I'm still learning better ways to use it. I rely on Illustrator and Photoshop for most of my work, but I'm also using InDesign.



2. As a Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign user since the very start Adobe has it easy. They have made the dominant series of software for so long it is a given that they should continue their regime.
   
   The problem is they have gotten insane with power. Without anyone to check them, the price grows along with the absurd use of memory.
   
   Examples:
   - Adobe used the worst installation process ever created by man and made a quick joy of using new programs into a day or two slog through hell. If there ever was a reason to pirate software, this punishing of paid users is definitely it.
   
   - You can't throw this application away. You need to find a hidden program in your computer to uninstall it first, then trash.
   
   - If you accidently trash it you need to run a script that they provide. The problem is this script (which isn't exactly simple) could erase you hard drive. Have fun!
   
   - If you decide that you'd just like to reinstall after trashing you can't. You need to use the script. A bit of DRM will not allow this to be installed, thus forcing you to potentially destroy your computer so they can avoid possible piracy.
   
   - Bridge while in concept is nice, is in functionality, less then useless.
   
   - Stock Photos? See above.
   
   - And Acrobat is the crown jewel of uselessness. It is so bloated and unintuitive it makes me wish Adobe had some real competition. When every other program can open a PDF faster then the company who created the file type you know there is an issue here.
   
   - Updates are welcome. Auto-updates are even nicer. That is until you learn the hard way that auto-updates delete preferences and color-palettes. So behind the scenes you are about to lose all of your work randomly. Sweet.
   
   - The improvements to all other applications are fairly minor outside some solid GUI tweaks
   
   My main complaint here is that the much touted connected community of applications still doesn't work. Transferring from one application to another is meant to be seamless and quick, but it is still a chore. These are not streamlined apps nor are they speedy workhorses - they are stuck in between and set to make very few power users happy. Even less for first time folk.
   
   On the plus side, the intel boosts are wonderful. And the rewritten InDesign makes me love that I switched from Quark so long ago. The new Flash is nice, and it integrates the best of all, but Actionscript 3 is a major step backwards in my opnion. It is far too code oriented for designers, and almost useless to coders.
   
   But in total, if you have a version of any of these apps on your computer this simply isn't worth your money or your time.



3. This is a must-have package for creative professionals. Amazon offers this suite at the most competitive price I know of.



4. The CS3 software is, as previous Adobe releases have been, great. Very great potential for creating and altering your own work, easy to use once you got your head around it, and with good interconnectivity.
   
   However, there are a couple of problems, as one reviewer also points out. Firstly this software is rather pricy and quite greedy memory wise, which is a bit of a bother. Secondly, as the same reviewer also remarks on, installing and uninstalling these products can quite quickly turn into a proper nightmare finding small obscure files in obscure places on your harddrive and risking your entire hard disk in the process. Thirdly, and this is connected with my second point, Adobe dosen't seem to care about anything but themselves. Their obsession with anti piracy implementations becomes a weight around the paying users ankles, and, as far as I know, dosen't slow down the pirates. Their customer service is unfriendly at best, and their greed second to none (this is sort of expensive software).
   
   In the end though, I wouldn't recommend any other software because this is the best out there, but it would be nice with an alternative. If only for the sake of shaking up the people at Adobe.



5. All products are superb. e,g the Workspace feature in Photoshop is a dream, it opens preselected floating windows that relate to the type of tasks you are performing.
   
   But the licensing is draconian. I thought I was buying a product bundle that I can install on different machines. But it turns out that you need to install all products in the suite on the same machine.This needs to be very clearly declared in all promotional materials for this suite so people like me can make better purchase decisions.

No comments about CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 Home & Student Edition.

5 comments about Corel KnockOut 2.

1. This product is advertised as a "powerful masking" tool that lets you "isolate and separate a detailed foreground object from an image." It is, however, an expensive tool that does not work as well as the tools built into Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. The selection tools within Paint shop, including the magic wand, are far more discriminating than Knockout and require far less touch ups. I can isolate and separate objects from graphics with Paint Shop Pro in 1/10th of the time as Knockout allows and with 10 times the accuracy.
   
   We all want a simpler way to isolate objects from graphics but this just isn't it. Save your money and spend it on other photo editing software plug-ins.



2. I found this easy to use, and Great at retaining the translucent and fringed edges of images. Love it, and use it on professional projects on a regular basis.



3. I have read the reviews here and find they either don't know how to use the software or installed it incorrectly. I have used Knockout since it first was released in the late-90s. This is the best tool for masking items from an image. And it does work with Adobe Photoshop CS2. It's important the Knockout Plugin is placed in the Photoshop/Plugins folder. It may seem cumbersome but it really isn't. It's just a little different way of thinking. They have a really good tech support that will give you hints on the best way to get started. The trick is start with a sloppily oversized marquee and zoom in to define it, adding and subtracting areas. Do this to both the inside and outside of the area needing masking. It's also good to have a Wacom Tablet Wacom Intuos3 6 x 8 Pen Tablet for a complete set of digital editing tools. The results are worlds better than you can achieve with Photoshop Extraction tool. I hope you enjoy this product as much as I have these 9+ years.



4. I've used Knockout since before it was available to the public. Yes, it is hard to learn and get the hang of and if you don't have time to get it down you will indeed give up. Is it worth the time? Depends on what you use it for. I used it for mainly extracting people with wild hair out of pictures with their hair not suffering any damage. It worked most of the time but there is often a lot of clean up afterwards as well.
   I agree with others in the fact that other programs offer easier ways of doing "nearly" the same thing. Boy, do I ever miss Picture It! Why doesn't Microsoft make it anymore? It was a kickbutt strong little program with tons of features. Never fails, whenever I like something - they stop making it.



5. Why ANYONE would offer a software product that is outdated by at least 7 YEARS is mind boggling to me.
   Whats worse is that the Amazon website says its compatible with Photoshop 5 "and higher" WRONG!!
   I tried to install and nothing. Then after calling Corel and getting a person who sounded like I woke him up at his customer service job said "it is ONLY compatible with Photoshop 5 or Lower" .
   What a joke.
   -Join Y2k