5 comments about Omnipage Pro 12 Office Edition.

1. Powerful software with multiple functionalities. Easy to use and exceptionally accurate. Favorite options: ability to edit PDFs and convert scanned files into HTML. Software saves a lot of time and pays for itself over the course of a couple months. Very satisfied. Can't beat the power for the price. Great product!



2. More accurate than any other scanning software on the market. Equipped with a bevy of good features, many of which you'll actually use. Can even scan and manipulate PDFs. This feature alone is worth the price, which is very reasonable given the power and performance. Have purchased ScanSoft products before for their speed and reliability. Omnipage Pro 12 Office is another impressive leap forward. Highly recommended.



3. I do a great deal of OCR in my research and have scanned thousands of pages each with OmniPage Pro 12 (OP12) and FineReader 6 (FR6). I have also made extensive use of previous versions of both programs. OP12 is a good package and can serve some needs adequately, but for my work, FR6 is superior in every respect. Others might have different preferences depending on what they do and what their equipment and software are.

   The bulk of my scanning/OCR involves academic articles and historical materials. For the most part I produce PDF files, although I also scan some tables to produce spreadsheets and do some scanning to Word files. Depending on the quality of the original and my precise purpose I may make a PDF with an image and hidden text, an OCR text file, or an OCR text file with images of uncertain words. I use an HP 7450 scanner connected to a Windows 2000 system with a 1.8 GHz P4 processor and 512 MB of RAM.

   Both do a good job of scanning. FR6 offers the option of more control over the scanning process, but OP12 generally does well with its automatic settings.

   OCR is another story, for several reasons. First of all, when the going gets tough, OP12 quits in a huff, at least on my system. It will suddenly crash with no warning whatever. This seems to be OCR-related, but if it happens while scanning the chances of recovering your already-scanned work are poor. For this reason, I always scan and recognize separately with OP12, since then the crashes usually do not corrupt the scanned images. Depending on the complexity of the material, I may get a crash anywhere from one in every 20 to one in 100 pages.

   Naturally, separate scanning and recognition slows the process down. On top of that, OP12 is very slow to start with, at least with "only" a 1.8GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM and all other applications closed. FR6 is distinctly faster and seems nearly bulletproof.

   Moreover, when accuracy of scanning counts, OP12 is next to useless for my purposes. That's because it is very weak on anything but straight text. Superscripts all look like quotation marks to it and subscripts all come out as commas. It is also very poor with any sort of special symbols or equations. Nor is there any way to correct these mistakes in the editing process -- you're forced to edit the PDFs with Adobe Acrobat, a very slow and laborious process. If you have material with as many superscripts, subscripts, and special symbols as the typical academic article, it is really faster to retype it than to try to do it with OP12. FR6, by contrast, gives reasonably good accuracy with such material and makes it easy to correct the mistakes that do crop up.

   In a surprising number of cases, OP12 will rotate the page so that the text is not upright and then proceed "recognize" it as garbage. FR6 is not altogether immune to this, but does it significantly less often.

   FR6 is sometimes wrong but never in doubt -- it has never reported being unable to complete OCR of a page, no matter how complex. OP12 is easily confused, especially when the page mixes text and tables, and then insists that you manually zone the page before it will proceed.

   Both programs offer an "auto-special" completely automatic mode that will do a decent job on simple material (assuming that OP12 doesn't crash in the middle). When you need to customize settings, however, FR6 offers more range of choices. It also offers more flexibility in correcting recognition errors and in manual zoning, should that be necessary.

   Surprisingly for a version 12, OP12 has a great many glitches, bugs, oddities, and time-wasting annoyances that make it seem more like an early beta. About 20% of the PDFs it produces are unreadable -- it's important always to check. The early FineReader versions were extremely rough, but FR6 is a very stable and finished product.

   As I say, OP12 is a good product and will no doubt serve many people well. If it comes free or at a very low price my advice would be to try it and see if it fills your needs. However, FR6 is more generally useful, faster, and trouble-free -- and significantly cheaper.

   Will O'Neil

   PS: I should remark that in the past I have complained of a few shortcomings in FR6 relating to scanning. I have now concluded that these were a result of scanner problems and/or some faulty settings on my part.




4. Omnipage Pro 12 loves to crash. So much so, that it is impossible to batch convert a folder of files to Adobe Acrobat .pdf "image with text", which is the only really useful Adobe Acrobat format. Here we are in the year 2003, and software developers still haven't figured out how to gracefully exit their programs when the unexpected happens. Ominpage Pro 12 simply cannot deal with Adobe Acrobat .pdf formats well. Review the user groups on Scansoft's website, and you will see two major problems with its Acrobat compatibility. The first is when using Scansoft on an existing .pdf image file. Importing the .pdf file, capturing the text, and saving the file as .pdf "image with text" (which is supposed to save the ORIGINAL image with searchable background text) causes the image to degrade. Don't ask me why, but the image in the output file is not the same quality as the imported .pdf image. So to work around this issue, I started scanning our documents into .tif format (600x600) on our high speed scanner, and then importing the .tifs into Scansoft, for conversion to .pdf "image with text". The resulting .pdf files were graphically sharper than when I had imported existing .pdf files. The big problem is that running the Omnipage Pro 12 "Schedule OCR" on the folder of .tif files, Omnipage Pro 12 simply crashes at random places in the conversion process. No graceful exit. No warning. To summarize, Scansoft's Omnipage Pro 12 is inadequate to save files as .pdf "image with text". It crashes. And this happens on both a Windows 98 PC and a Windows 2000 PC, so it's not a PC-specific issue. Scansoft wants to charge you [a fee]to submit a problem form. Imagine, paying them to spend time fixing their own mistake! This is a bad way to conduct business.



5. Crashes too much.
   
   Look at the dates on the other reviews (all of them - about 10 at this time). Notice all the nice "5 star" reviews come in clumps on the same date (3 on one date, 2 on another, 3 on another)! Also note that nearly all the "5 star" reviews are from people who did not have any other review on Amazon. And they are all about the same length.
   
   I trust the lower star ratings reviews on this product more than the 5 star ones. Especially the person who wrote the longish review.

No comments about Freddi Fish Maze Madness.

4 comments about Masterclips 1,250,000.

1. I owned copies of Masterclips since it began with only 50,000 clips. Clipart featured are good quality artwork yet economically priced. Very good value for money compared to near rivals - corel gallery or clickart. I have found the range illustrated on a comprehensive colour catalogue very convenient and easily referred to, unlike some who only provide a black & white paper catalogue. The thumbnail reference is just as good if a wee bit tedious. I am waiting for 2 million cliparts to come with a further improved thumbnail browser based on subject categorization besides 1,000,000 on colour print. A wishlist - Is it possible to get rest of clipart on cd? I do not mind having another 28 cds for the next 500,000 clips. Less tedium than downloading from website the rest.



2. There really is an incredible amount of clip art in this collection. A good portion of it is even useful. The only problem I have with the software is having to shut down all running applications on my computer in order to use the browser feature. With 192mb of ram on my system, I should have ample resources to do what I want, but for some reason, this software locks my computer up tight.



3. This is a fair collection for the money. The 500K images you receive on 24 cds are adequate. To get the other 750K you have to subscribe (for free) to a 1 year online membership. After the free 1 year, you are back to 500K, so this is misleading. They should title it 1.25 million images for 12 months.

   The main problem I have are the disks are stored in cardboard albums. When mine arrived I removed the shrink wrap. Disk #1 (install & search disk) had fallen out of its slot and moved around within the album during shipment and was scratched making installation very difficult. After several attempts and un-installs, success! Search capabilites with this disk are now unstable. Some times it works, sometimes it doesn't. The remainder of the disks seem to be OK. The images we use most are the large collection of color workplace signs (No Smoking, No Parking, Exit, Fire Extinguisher, etc. This alone will pay offset the cost for most businesses.




4. This software has a ton of great clip art and photos for use, but the browser software for it is a massive resource hog and very unstable. In order for me to use it, I have to shut down everything thats running on my system, and then launch the Masterclips browser. Even then, it still locks up.

   I uninstalled the software and put it on the shelf to collect dust.

3 comments about iLife [OLDER VERSION].

1. If you're on a Mac, you've probably used at least one of these programs by now. If not, you're missing out on what Steve Jobs calls "The hub of your digital lifestyle."

   iMovie - For the amatuer film maker, or somebody who just wants to edit their own home movies, this is a cakewalk. Once you connect your camera through a Firewire port, you import your video. Add titles. Add fades, transitions, etc... Add some background music. Then, download it back to your camera (or, with a bridge, to a VCR). Better yet, save it out and import the video to iDVD for burning.

   iDVD - I can't begin to tell you how easy this is. Create a menu (or select one of the many theme menus). Import your video. Click burn to DVD. It is literally that easy. I made a DVD of our improv troupe for all the members' Christmas gifts.

   iTunes - If it's a music file... mp3, aiff, wav... it can import to iTunes. Create a music CD. Burn it as a standard or mp3 CD with a single click.

   iPhoto - You can set this up to open and import the images as soon as your camera mounts to the desktop. Organize the images. Edit them for color or size. Then, burn a CD, make a slideshow, or even order a personalized bound book with your images and text.

   The one major flaw of these programs has been the lack of manuals (except through third parties). A small price to pay for this kind of quality. Also, if you have no need for iDVD, the other three are available for download from the Apple web site.




2. Where to start to talk about how amazing the latest offering is from Apple for the Macintosh? Let's take it one step at a time.

   iMovie 3: Apple took their already great DV editing program and added so many new features it's almost mind boggling! Drag and drop from your iPhoto photo library. Drag and drop from your iTunes music library. Granted, you were able to do these things before in a somewhat clumsy way through the "import" command, but this makes it beyond easy. Chapter support (The ability to break up longer videos on DVD's to easily skip back and forth) for iDVD. Individual volume control for each audio track at any point in the track. One click access for all three of the other iApps. New titles, new transitions, the "Ken Burns" effect with stills. No other DV software available for ANY platform is as easy to use as this. Also if you download from Apple it's FREE!

   iPhoto: Still mostly looks the same, but there is now support for the other digital lifestyle iApps built in. The "Retouch" editing feature works amazing well. Also if you download it from Apple it's FREE! If your into serious photo editing, you'll still want a companion program. Photoshop Elements is a good choice. 70% of Photoshop at 1/5 of the price.

   iTunes: I honestly don't see much difference here. I'm sure changes were made to integrate it with the other iApps. Still a great program though. If you download it from Apple (deja vu) it's FREE!

   iDVD: Some new themes, some new features make this a worthy addition to any SuperDrive equipped Mac. No other DVD authoring software I've seen is as easy to use and as intuitive as iDVD. AND if you download it from Apple it's....um....not available. iDVD can only be purchased as part of the iLife package AND then only installed if you have a Superdrive equipped (internal drive only and as far as I know ONLY if installed by Apple) G4 PowerMac.

   Complaints: Yeah a few. iMovie crashed a few times while performing multiple operations (granted it was doing 4 "Ken Burns" and 5 transitions at the time) on my 933 SuperDrive G4 Quicksilver Tower. Also the Apple restricts iDVD to only those people who bought their SuperDrive equipped G4 computers. C'mon Apple! We bought the hardware. Let us configure it ourselves without penalties! Also, you must be running at least 10.1.5 or later (10.2 HIGHLY recommended). System 9 users are officially out in the cold for this product.

   In conclusion: If you meet the hardware/software specs, this is a must buy! No SuperDrive? Find a fast online connection and download the other pieces.




3. This is a collection of iTunes 3, iPhoto 2, iMovie 3, and iDVD 3 that Apple offers on all their latest machines with Superdrive installed. All but iDVD 3 are available as downloads from the Apple website, but it is worth the $...or whatever to get them altogether and include the iDVD 3. The iDVD 3 is not available as a download because of its size (>1.3 gig) Each of the four programs is good, but the seamless combination of the four (five including iPod) makes this system an easy to learn combination. After looking for almost a year and a half at different software/hardware combinations for editing and converting (to digital for DVD), I decided on the Mac and the iLife package. There are certainly more powerful individual programs available on both the PC and Mac platforms, but this combination beats everything else that I looked at for ease of use and simplicity in learning. I am very pleased with my decision.

5 comments about Art Explosion 750,000 For MAC.

1. Sure Art Explosion has nifty stock images that can help in a pinch with small graphic solutions, but what to do with 48 CDs that come shrink-wrapped on a spindle with no lid? In the past the CDs would come supplied with a carrying case. So don't expect one to come with this collection or to get a response from Nova even though they advertise a money back guarantee.



2. My daughter works as a computer graphic's artist as her profession. Because of this I found out she wanted the Art Explosion 750,000 For MAC as an adjunct for her job. So I ordered one as a birthday gift.
   
   Since we don't live near to one another I had it shipped as a birthday gift to her home.
   
   Only weeks later did I find out that part of the delivery came through damaged, and she was then dealing to have the problem rectified!
   
   I asked if she wanted me as purchaser to follow up, but she told me she would deal with it.
   
   I'm sure she will eventually get satisfaction either from Amazon or whomever is eventually responsible.



3. As a graphic designer, I'm always looking for tools like this. When I bought this for our shop, we were planning on using the icons for quick placement in our statement designs. We also looked forward to using the fonts and other clip art eps features for various quicky projects. Unfortunately, the interface is difficult to use, and loading the CDs is tedious.
   
   The stock photos are worthless. I have yet to use one of their 1970s photos for anything other than a good laugh.
   
   The font database has nothing usable.
   
   Overall, this was a waste of $100. Our shop has used it probably half a dozen times, and I don't imagine we'll use it much from here forward.



4. This is horribly misleading. Not only did 3 of the DVDs not load (just spun and spun), but the two that did gave me a glimpse of the "art" they claim to be so great and high quality. The clip art is amateurish, the background images are ... ugh, they're just gross. And the photography is a complete joke. It's all circa 1970s and 80s, the quality is very poor. They appear to be scanned in and have the quality of a shaky grandmother's album. And high quality? Ha! The images not only are lo-res (180 dpi), but they are also small in size (4x5")! This is a complete and utter joke. Don't bother.



5. The bulk of my projects as a freelance graphic designer is designing books for national publication. This collection is a treasure trove of images -- I can always find just the right graphic for my bookblock layouts. All 5 discs operate perfectly and I really love the 1800+ page image library catalog. It's very well indexed so I don't have to spend a lot of time browsing through the discs to find what I'm looking for. It has already paid for itself many times over, both in time and cost.

1 comments about PhotoSuite 4 Business Edition.

1. this program is very easy to use and has many interesting features such as changing the lightness or darkness, making panoramas, superimposing cutouts onto other pictures and blending the image for realism, and stretching the pictures. you may also drag one picture on top of the other picture and reduce its visual appearance so that it looks like you have 2 pictures in one. this comes in handy when you want to make a ghost appear using a cutout.
   
   about the only feature i found was missing on this program that would have been really useful was the typing words in the picture. if it is there, i couldn't find it and i played around with this software alot.
   
   one of the most useful features was the gamma adjustment which allows you to increase or decrease the lighting, in a different way then just contrast changes. it allows you to see some of the objects that you wouldn't just be able to brighten up. it is more or less like looking through nightvision goggles.
   
   you can adjust the coloring and tweek it to any way you like which makes it extremely handy if you want to make old style pictures with the reddish hue.
   
   the printing features come in handy as well. you can mitchmatch what size of pictures you want on a normal sized paper. you can put a 6X8 with 2 3X5s on the same sheet or whatever you want.
   
   fun to work with and fun to play around with. if you have a digital camera and you just want to change around the pictures to your tastes, this is perfect for you.

5 comments about SecureClean 4.0.

1. I was amazed at all the stuff this program found on my computer, things that I thought were long gone or didn't even remember were there. And then, with the click of a button, they're gone. It made my computer seem so much cleaner, and made me feel safer as it safely and completely removed some sensitive information that I hadn't known was even accesible any more.



2. Great product. Software identifies all "deleted" files and allows for permanent removal from hard drive. Also finds personal information, which otherwise was considered secure. An obsolute must for anyone working with sensitive data. Apparently, MS Windows and security are foreign concepts to each other.



3. I purchased SecureClean for my Windows XP SP2 computer, and it found 2,152 files of sensitive data that I had deleted. The scan results were informative and truly eye-opening. I highly recommend this software for anyone who needs to be sure sensitive data is permanently erased. As a bonus, my computer now performs better than it did before the cleaning.



4. This is a great product. For anyone who wants to make sure their personal information is inaccessible and get rid of their extra files without completely removing everything else, SecureClean is perfect. I got it for Christmas, ran it, and now, my computer runs much faster; I now run it once a week and don't have to worry about my personal information being retrieved.



5. 
   When I ordered this it was posted as being vista compatible. However it needed a visit to White canyon's web site to down load a fix before it would run.
   
   It's a very straight forward program that scrubs all the personal data from your day to day windows use, like cookies, edited files names, temporary files etc.
   
   It will also let you completely remove files, for good, at various strengths. So , for example, you can delete with 3 over writes for DOD standard removal, or 7 if you are paranoid, or even 12 for spies (if you have the patience).
   
   Handy if you are selling your old computer. It will speed up the PC if you let it erase the deleted file names etc. that can clutter up the hard drive.
   
   Easy to use and effective.

No comments about Borland Delphi 8 Enterprise Upgrade From Delphi 7.

3 comments about Fix-It Utilities 3.0.

1. Fix-it Utilities is an all-in-one suite of programs that fix problems and fine tune your computer for maximun efficiency and protection. The defrag utility has been improved as has the disk fixer. The registry clearner and registry defrag utilities are the best available. The antivirus program is top notch. It takes up less hard drive space than Norton or McAfee (about 100 mb less). Also, new with this version is a selective install that lets you install only the components that you want. In short, a great utility gets better. Anyone running Win 9X, Win ME and Win NT 4 and above should not be without it.



2. I bought this program to "fix" the various start up bugs in win 98 along with other program glitches that my old Norton software used to fix on win 95. Fix-it has better graphics, action video as the program runs and lots of lists on what it is doing, but never fixed and supported my programs like the Norton programs did. After plowing on through the complicated instructions, I'm back to Norton for the win 98 and never looking back. Fix-it does have a good defrag program, but so did dos. For me, it was very disappointing.



3. Fix-it got rid of the sober worm from my computer when Panda and Norton's could not even find it!
   I would sugest this product to any and all!

No comments about Brain Quest 1st Grade.