Jack Wallen

Published: 24 Sep 2008 17:22 BST

I have gone through many browsers in my IT lifetime, from Lynx to Mosaic to Mozilla to Netscape to Firefox to Internet Explorer to Safari to Flock.

But there's another browser that peeks its head in and out of that cycle: Opera.

Opera is a browser that gets little press in accounts of the battle for internet supremacy. Yet it is a browser that is making huge waves in certain arenas (for example, mobile) and is always a steady player in the browser market.

Here are 10 reasons why you might want to use a browser that is often overlooked in the market.

1. Speed
It seems no matter how many leaps and bounds Firefox and Internet Explorer make, Opera is always able to render pages faster.

In both cold and warm starts, Opera beats Firefox and Internet explorer. I'm not talking about a difference the naked eye is incapable of seeing either. The speed difference is actually noticeable. So, if you are a speed junky, you may want to use Opera for this reason alone.

2. Speed Dial
Speed Dial is one of those features that generally steals the show with browsers. It's basically a set of visual bookmarks on one page.

To add a page to Speed Dial, you simply click on an empty slot in the Speed Dial page and enter the information.When you have a full page of Speed Dial bookmarks, you can quickly go to the page you want by clicking the related image.

For even faster browsing, you can click the Ctrl + * key combination (where * is the number 1-9 associated with your page, as assigned in Speed Dial).

3. Widgets
Opera Widgets are like Firefox extensions on steroids.

Widgets are what the evolution of the web is all about: little web-based applications you can run from inside — or, in some cases, outside — your browser. Some of the widgets are useful (such as the Touch The Sky international weather applet) and some are just fun (such as the SimAquarium.) They are just as easy to install as Firefox extensions.

4. Wand
You can save form information and/or passwords with this useful tool.

Every time you fill out a form or a password, the Wand will buy cialis generic ask you if you want to save the information. When you save information — in a form, for example — a yellow border will appear around the form. The next time you need to fill out that form, click on the Wand button or click Ctrl + Enter, and the information will automatically be filled out for you.

5. Notes
When browsing, have you ever wanted to take notes about a page or site (or something totally unrelated to your web browsing)?

Opera comes complete with a small Notes application that allows you to jot down whatever you need to jot down.

To access Note, click on the Tools menu and then click on Notes. The tool itself is incredibly simple to use and equally as handy.

6. BitTorrent
Yes it is true, Opera has a built-in BitTorrent protocol.

The built-in BitTorrent client is simple to use: Click on a torrent link, and a dialogue box will open asking you where you want to download the file.

The torrent client is enabled by default, so, if your company doesn't allow torrenting, you should probably disable this feature.

When downloading torrents, you will continue to share content until you either stop the download or close the browser.

7. Display modes
Another unique-to-Opera feature is its display modes, which allows you to quickly switch between Fit To Width and Full Screen mode.

Fit To Width mode adjusts the page size to the available screen space while using flexible reformatting.

Full Screen mode gives over the entire screen space to browsing. In this mode, you drop all menus and toolbars, leaving only context menus, mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts.

Full Screen mode is especially good for smaller screens.

8. Quick Preferences
The Quick Preferences menu is one of those features the power user will really appreciate.

I use it quite often to enable or disable various features, and not having to open up the Preferences window makes for a much quicker experience.

From the Quick Preferences menu, you can alter preferences for pop-ups, images, Java/JavaScript, plug-ins, cookies and proxies. This is perfect when you are one of those users who block cookies all the time, until a site comes along where you want to enable cookies.

9. Mouse Gestures
Mouse Gestures is a built-in feature that applies certain actions to specific mouse movements or actions. For example, you can go back a page by holding down the right mouse button and clicking the left mouse button.

This is pretty handy on a laptop, where using the track pad can take more time than you probably want to spend on navigation. Even for those who prefer to keep their hands on the keys and not the mouse, the feature can still save time.

Instead of having to get to the mouse, move the mouse to the toolbar and click a button, you simply have to get your hands to the mouse and make the gesture for the action to take place. Of course, this does require learning the gestures.

10. Session saving
I am a big fan of this feature. All too many times, I have needed to close a browser window but didn't want to lose a page. To keep from losing the page, I would keep a temporary bookmark file where I could house these bookmarks.

With Opera, that's unnecessary. If you have a page or a number of pages you want to save, you just go to the File menu and then the Sessions submenu and click Save This Session. The next time you open Opera, the same tabs will open.

You can also manage your saved sessions so that you can save multiple sessions and delete selected sessions.

The upshot
From the above list alone, you can see how easily Opera separates itself from the rest of the crowd. It's a different beast in the web-browsing arena. Opera is fast, stable and cross-platform, and contains many features that other browsers can't touch.

Elsa Wenzel CNET

Published: 23 Sep 2008

With Creative Suite 4, Adobe aims to make Flash easier for newcomers to learn and less of a hassle for veterans to use. Flash CS4 offers a fundamentally different approach to animation with object-based tweening.

In addition, the workspace is more elegant and options expand to work with the latest video formats and web applications. And as with each new release, added design tools enable creative types to create more complicated-looking animation more quickly.

The cost hasn't changed since Flash CS3: £489 (ex. VAT) or £139 (ex. VAT) to upgrade. It's a better deal when included within any of the bundled CS4 suites — except for Design Standard, which excludes Flash.

Adobe has reinvented the building blocks of Flash animation, so you can get started in two steps. No longer must you create a symbol, then manually apply and adjust keyframes and tweens; Adobe defines selected items as a symbol for you. It should be easier to control and tweak animation now that it applies to an object rather than to a Timeline keyframe. Right-click on an object, select Create Motion Tween, and the time span is created automatically.

Workspace adjustments include a vertical Properties panel. Also found across Adobe Creative Suite 4, a drop-down menu makes it easier to switch among workspaces, while tabs let you hop among open documents. And panels are simpler to resize, open and close. By default, the Timeline now lines up along the bottom of the Stage. Designers should like hot-text editing, also found in Photoshop and After Effects.

The new XFL file format is supposed to help print designers or motion artists using InDesign or After Effects to dip their toes in Flash, as exported XFL content can be used in any of these programs. With this XML-based format, you can extract assets from work done in Flash. Adobe aims to phase in XFL gradually, rather than forcing saved content by default in this convention.

Content is supposed to render more quickly than in CS3, although we found this hard to measure with the rough-draft code.

The Adobe Media Encoder enables Flash developers to create H.264 content for web videos that stream quickly even on a narrow pipeline. Dropping video within Flash content is possible using several steps. You can save an MPEG4, say, rather than an FLV file, encoded as tkH.264, without needing to re-encode the video.

The capability to author Adobe AIR content lets you create web-based applications, including those with transparent backgrounds, on your desktop.

New design tools include 3D Translation and 3D Rotation, Bones and Deco. With Bones, you can create inverse kinematics animation, ideal for, say, rotating the arm of a crane or Rube Goldberg contraption to set off a reaction among related mechanical parts. The Deco tool helps you create repetitive patterns, such as blinking stars in the sky, geometric wallpaper patterns or intricate designs of vines, without messing around with ActionScript.

A library of motion presets can get you started on more sophisticated animation that could be tricky to build from scratch.

We've been toying with beta rough-draft versions of buy cialis doctor online Adobe CS4 applications for several weeks. We'll update these first impressions with rated reviews once we check out the final code.

If the gold code proves to be stable, Flash CS4 looks far more attractive than CS3, largely for its less taxing approach to animation, and newcomers might want to skip CS3 altogether. That said, first-timers still might need to pay for a how-to book or a class to learn the application in depth.

Elsa Wenzel CNET

Published: 24 Sep 2008

Some veteran users of Adobe Creative Suite may find that version 4 offers few extraordinary updates to justify the high cost. However, designers and editors who lean on Dreamweaver for complex dynamic web sites will find plenty of tweaks for editing code more easily within its WSIWYG interface.

The look and feel of this application now matches those of other Creative Suite applications. You can jump among customisable workspaces from a pull-down menu, and we find the collapsible panels more elegant to place and resize.

Dreamweaver's new Code Navigator shows the CSS rules underlying layout elements. Just hover over a footer, for instance, and double-click on the text, and the navigator can take you to the code for formatting text styles. A new CSS mode in the Properties panel provides quick access to code.

Dreamweaver's new Live View shows stuff that's otherwise tricky to spot with JavaScript running in a browser, such as image rollovers. For instance, you can freeze a view of the rollover state while you're working with code in Dreamweaver.

There's more cooperation among the Creative Suite overall. For instance, you can drag and drop SWF files into Dreamweaver pages. With Photoshop Smart Objects, you can drop PSD files into web pages without losing track of source files.

To run Dreamweaver CS4 on a Windows computer, you'll need XP SP2 or Vista with a 1GHz or greater processor and 1GB or more of disk space available. buy cialis brand Mac users must have a PowerPC G5 or Intel-based machine running at least OS X version 10.4.11, with at least 512 MB of RAM and 1.8GB of free disk space. You'll also need a DVD drive and a 1,280 by 800 display with a 16-bit video card.

The £335 (ex. VAT) cost of Dreamweaver hasn't changed since CS3. Users of earlier versions can pay the £139 (ex. VAT) upgrade fee. We'll report back with a rated review once we check out the final code, which is due later in the autumn.

Lori Grunin CNET

Published: 25 Sep 2008

At last, Illustrator can handle multipage projects. That critical feature, which has been Illustrator's weak spot for generations, finally provides a reason for users of older versions to update to Illustrator CS4. True, there are some other very nice capabilities introduced in the latest iteration as well, but the simple ability to create the front and the back of a document in a single file should thrill legions of designers who've repeatedly thought about switching to CorelDraw in disgust.

Granted, the implementation is a bit odd; not bad, as far as I can tell, just odd. With CS3, Adobe introduced a crop tool that allowed you to define sections that could be individually printed or processed by Acrobat. With CS4, the company extends those crop areas to act as separate Artboards, and each Artboard is sort of treated like a page. The benefit of this architecture is that the Artboards can be any size, so you can mix a variety of page sizes and types within a single document. Each Artboard is numbered like a page, and if you delete an Artboard, Illustrator will renumber to maintain the sequence. You can create a document with a predefined number of Artboards, or create buy cialis 10mg them on the fly by simply creating a crop area.

If you actually use Illustrator for illustration, rather than page layout, you'll really like the Blob brush, which allows for more natural stroke blending. Rather than preserving each stroke as an individual path, it combines the strokes — or the erasures — in a single path. If gradients are your thing, the new interactive gradient widget makes creating and editing them a more streamlined process; plus it now supports transparency and elliptical gradients. It does bear saying that CorelDraw has also had these capabilities for several versions, though.

There are also a variety of subtle enhancements to program operation, including the ability to apply graphic styles additively. A few changes to the panels include a modification of the Appearance panel's operation — it's now an attribute editor, allowing you to toggle visibility or adjust parameters like opacity, blend mode, and fill colour — and the addition of a basic Separations preview panel for pre-preflighting colour. Adobe has improved (some might say 'fixed') Isolation mode, where you drill down into objects to selectively edit, to keep from enraging you if you deleted the only object in the isolation set. Live preview on clipping masks makes working with them a bit easier, and the Smart Guides now have little readouts that display basics like object dimensions.

Finally, there's beefed-up integration with Kuler, Adobe's social network for colour palettes, and improvement in Live Color operation. Illustrator can pull palettes directly from the Kuler site into the swatches panel as a colour group.

Althoough it looks like Illustrator CS4 will be a must-have upgrade, don't feel bad if you've got some lingering annoyance that it should have had these must-have features a couple versions ago.